In my every day work here at Austin Public Library, I have the opportunity to stumble across many cool books. Often these are in subjects I wouldn’t normally consider reading for leisure. For instance, I was blown away yesterday when I discovered The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained. Are you groaning right now at the thought of reading philosophy for fun? I don’t blame you but this is the most straightforward and attractive book I’ve seen on the topic.
The book begins with a section on each of the major time periods of philosophy and then contains information on individual philosophers with easy to understand overviews of their major concepts. The graphics in each section certainly help the book look more appealing, but more importantly they serve to supplement the text as well. What I found particularly helpful was the way the book focuses on how philosophers are related to one another by listing their “branch” and “approach” as well as giving you a list of philosophers with related theories.
Another nice feature is the directory at the back which lists all the philosophers featured, the period in which they worked, a short blurb about their ideas and a short list of related philosophers. I do wish this section also included their “branch” as well but that’s easy enough to find.
Other graphic guides to philosophy that you might enjoy!
Some writers grab hold and don’t let go. Their sensibilities, style, and focus meld with something in us, turning reading into magic. Reynolds Price is one such writer for me. His novels and memoirs are constructed of individually beautiful sentences trumped only by the sense of wonder instilled by the whole. While reading his books I experience the tell-tale sign of a great book—the dread of knowing the book must end. They all end, but Price was prolific, leaving novels, memoirs, poems, and meditations on faith.
You may not like documentaries because they tend to make you sad or mad or both; however, you might like the style in which the story is told in a mockumentary.
novel, Irving pulls off his customary, but still highly impressive, trick of investing his fiction with the status of myth. In a 1986 essay on Dickens, he praised his idol for devising "a new literary form, a kind of fairy tale that is at once humorous, heroic and realistic" – and it's this form that he once again uses here. Like Dickens, too, he makes the division of the world into two basic groups, the good–hearted and the mean–spirited, but the good-hearted characters outnumber the mean-spirited in this novel.
I spent the weekend with Stephen King. He’s written another doorstop, this one about traveling back in time to prevent Oswald from killing Kennedy. Denigrate horror if you like; you’d not be talking about Stephen King. For my money (and by that I mean library late fees) he transcends the genre.
I perpetually have long lists of things. Things to clean, recipes to try, travel to plan and, of course, books to read. And for some reason I can be a real idiot about this last one. I will sometimes put off books for ages even when it seems (or perhaps because) every person I know has read and loved it. Then I finally get around to reading them and I, like my friends assure me, fall in love with them as well.
The European Championships of soccer kicked off last Friday. After two years of qualification matches, sixteen countries qualified for the tournament. Poland and Ukraine serve as tournament hosts. Spain won in 2008 and hope to defend their title. Each country offers its own unique approach to the game. Spain dances through its opposition. Italy defends well and looks for counterattacks. The Germans work like a machine. The Dutch end up arguing with each other. The championship final is July 1. I plan to supplement my watching with some novels from participating countries.
