Reading. Period.

For lovers of libraries and bookstores and books in general who also happen to be students, summer is the high point of the year. There is actually time to read that new novel or old favorite, reason to buy that random volume that catches your eye from the bookstore window, freedom to dig into that list of books to read you started last September. I once spent the summer in a sublet that belonged to a graduate student in the English department, and the sublet came with a library I still dream about. I spent that summer devouring what little I could (a pitifully small amount).

Most of what I read was the kind of stuff you’re “supposed” to read to be well-rounded and literate and cool like that. But there are always new and wonderful and crazy books to be read, so we are pleased to bring you some random and not-so-random new titles, just in time for you to blow off your reading period work.

Read This Book

The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, by Louis Menand. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

His publisher, while bemoaning the current lack of serious and talented writers in the “man of letters” category, admitted, “There are brilliant writers—Louis Menand is perhaps the all-around best.” A staff writer at The New Yorker and Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Menand’s Metaphysical Club is a triumph of intelligent writing. He addresses a set of divinely elegant themes that speak to the very essence of what so many of us either take for granted or truly struggle with in our studies.

Menand sets out to illuminate the development of American “ways of thinking” from the Civil War into the 20th century. The key word is pragmatism, and Menand’s account of the development of modern American thought will inspire and enlighten readers of all academic stripes. The starting point is the Metaphysical Club that met in Cambridge, Mass. for a few brief months in 1872, but the tale goes far beyond that place and moment in time. Menand combines rich and detailed stories of individual American thinkers with wide-ranging and fascinating accounts of larger intellectual and social contexts and movements. The idea is that ideas are tools used to negotiate our way through the world, rather than certainties to be relied upon absolutely.

The Metaphysical Club is technically a history book, but it is intellectual and cultural history at its finest. Its direct and immediate relevance to questions of how ideas are used make it so much more than a mere history book. If the book has a flaw, it is that Menand is not willing to argue the seemingly obvious larger significance of his work very forcefully. Each chapter stands on its own as a coherent and fascinating read, but Menand isn’t heavy-handed about making sure we understand all of the connections between his intricate arguments perfectly. The reader is largely left on his or her own to realize just how amazing and important these philosophical and epistemological assumptions really were (and still are), and just how wonderfully conceived and executed The Metaphysical Club really is. The book is simply beautiful, in its prose and its ambitions. It will be deservedly adored by all who care about how ideas about ideas tangibly affect the way we see and live in the world.

From Japan With Love

Sputnik Sweetheart, by Haruki Murakami. (Knopf)

Murakami is one of Japan’s more famous writers, and has been called that country’s most likely candidate for a Nobel prize in literature. He has a good number of novels (including The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Dance Dance Dance and Norwegian Wood) and short story collections in English translation. Sputnik Sweetheart, translated by Philip Gabriel, is the latest effort in a long line of fun and outlandish tales featuring desperate quests and characters that could easily be you.

Murakami’s work skillfully avoides the standard literary categories and tired non-plots that plague so many other contemporary writers. Sputnik Sweetheart tells the story of a student in love with a woman in love with another woman, all against the backdrop of the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of the Sputnik satellite. Don’t worry, it’s more bizarre and wonderful than it sounds, and the adventure leads us from Japan to Europe to the coast of Greece and then to the satellite itself. You need to be somewhat cool (and puzzling) in order to have the international following that Murakami does.

Devil in a What?

My Little Blue Dress, by Bruno Maddox. (Viking)

If I could just quote a little something from the “Biography” sent to The Crimson with the first novel of Bruno P. Maddox ’92: “Bruno was educated at Westminster School in London, then at Harvard University in America. He studied English, which at that time, the dying days of postmodernism, meant scouring the canon for coded references to genitalia and despite wildly inconsistent grades he was finally hailed as brilliant for his senior thesis on the use of adjectives in restaurant menus.” I suspect Maddox himself had a hand in writing that; publicists usually aren’t that irreverent.

My Little Blue Dress supposedly tells the story of a woman born on January 1, 1900, but we eventually figure out that it’s just Bruno talking, and talking faster and faster the further along we get. He seems to be in a hurry. The novel takes a wholeheartedly absurd stab at the memoir genre, and, according to its own publicity materials, succeeds admirably (as books always do in publicity handouts). The life of the century through the life of this woman with the little blue dress, as it were. The memoir of this “woman” begins with her childhood in the English countryside, then follows her adventures in Paris, London and New York. And yet after all that, she ends up growing old in New York’s Chinatown with a caretaker named Bruno Maddox. Hmmm. Something’s not quite right, but that something appears to be why we should think this book is so cool.

Maddox’s most recent institutional gig was as editor of Spy magazine (he seems very proud of the fact that he “elevated it to within spitting distance of its former glory” and then “accidentally drove it out of business”), and this debut has been getting not an insignificant amount of good buzz. Hopefully it’s as funny and original as Maddox and his conspirators seem to think it is. I plan to read it for its somewhat original premise and its seemingly healthy sense of self-worth and promising sense of humor. Plus, anyone who can get away with a thesis on adjectives in restaurant menus must have something interesting to say.

Mmm....existentialism.

The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer, edited by William Irwin, Mark T. Conard and Aeon J. Skoble. (Open Court)

Harvard being the school that it is, “The Simpsons” enjoys a cult-like following not only for its occasional references to our fair school, but for its unbeatable combination of humor and intelligence as well. This newest attempt to bring philosophy to the masses does not exactly do justice to our love for television’s finest program. The book is no doubt part of that weird trend that has produced books like The Tao of Pooh, which attempts to show us how Taoism can be relevant to our own modern and western existence, and The Consolations of Philosophy, a primer on how thinkers like Montaigne and Seneca can be relevant to our everyday experiences.

The Simpsons and Philosophy is actually the second title in the publisher’s Popular Culture and Philosophy series. (Volume 1 was called Seinfeld and Philosophy; Volume 3, forthcoming, is entitled The Matrix and Philosophy.) The book is a shameless attempt to pander to all the intellectuals and psuedo-intellectuals who recognize and celebrate the sophisticated and slapstick comedy of “The Simpsons,” but it is more of a general(ly mediocre) survey of various philosophical concepts that can be projected onto the show. We get essays by random associate and assistant professors of philosophy entitled “Homer and Aristotle,” “Marge’s Moral Motivation,” “The Moral World of the Simpson Family” and discussions of how Nietzsche might justify Bart’s behavior, but the book somehow ends up being less informative and entertaining than one would expect from a project riding on the coattails of such a popular show. Maybe America’s favorite family was not meant for the academy; the essays resemble bullshit undergraduate papers written in jest and under duress. True fans of the show, however, will be excited to simply see the book in stores.