Sophie's World

Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy by Jostein Gaardner (1991) 523 pages

This novel is about a high schooler in Norway, named Sophie, who begins receiving mysterious letters offering a course on Philosophy. I've had it on my reading list since before I used Goodreads. It was a nice review of the Intro to Philosophy course I took in college. About half way through you find out an officer working for the United Nations in Lebanon has written this work of fiction and has sent it home to his daughter Hilde, who is the same age as the fictional Sophie, for her birthday. By this point, I had become invested in the story of Sophie and her Philosophy teacher, so it was a bit frustrating that Sophie's story becomes more and more fantastic, and Hilde's story is about her reading what we have just read. My college course ended with Kant, so I was interested in an overview beyond that period of philosophic thought. The Philosophy teacher in the story begins pulling in other sciences with discussion of Darwin and Freud. More and more mythical and fairy-tale characters strangely pop up in Sophie's world as well. It really leans in to the dual worlds of grounded reality and mysterious fantasy, but I don't think the author mixes them particularly well.
 

The Sol Majestic

The Sol Majestic by Ferrett Steinmetz, 384 pages

Savor Station is a remote space station best known for The Sol Majestic, the most exclusive restaurant in the universe. People will travel light years to visit, and reservations are made years in advance. But Kenna doesn't know about The Sol Majestic when he arrives. He's a starving teenager, dragged from station to station by his parents, who are attempting to fulfill the Inevitable Philosophies of their religion while haranguing Kenna for not yet coming up with his own Philosophy. Yet by pure dumb luck, Kenna finds himself in the kitchen of The Sol Majestic, falling in love with the work the chefs perform every day and falling in love with one chef in particular, an indentured servant named Benzo. Soon the fate of Kenna's as-yet-unknown Inevitable Philosophy and the grandiose-but-bleeding-money restaurant are intertwined, causing Kenna to doubt the religion of his parents as well as his own humanity.

This book is a love letter to food, to determination, to hardworking labor. In rebelling against his parents' prohibitions against manual labor and mixing with the commoners, Kenna learns about the universe around him as well as about himself. So in that sense, it's a fairly standard coming-of-age tale. But it also delves into the concepts of knowledge, of power, of honesty, of skill, and of time itself. While parts felt a bit slow to me, I ended up loving this book and the way it resolved itself. I'm so glad Ferrett Steinmetz decided to keep writing and created this book.

The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt

The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: a Tyranny of Truth / Ken Krimstein, 233 p.

A lovely graphic biography of the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil, et al.  Krimstein doesn't shy away from the intellectual challenges posed by Arendt's work, but he still produces an accessible, enjoyable read.  The artwork is lovely,  all in gray except for images of Hannah, which are splashed with a fresh green.  Intimate and rigorous.  I can't tell whether this will lead me to (finally) undertake to read the great Arendt, but Krimstein has at least tempted me.