Todd May's 6 favorite books that offer philosophical insight

Todd May's 6 favorite books that offer philosophical insight

By The Week US|Aug. 13th, 2024

 Philosopher Todd May was an adviser for NBC's acclaimed sitcom "The Good Place" and is the author of 18 books of philosophy. His latest, "Should We Go Extinct?," explores whether Earth would be better off without human beings. 

'Memoirs of Hadrian' by Marguerite Yourcenar (1951)

The greatest novel most people have never heard of. The Roman emperor Hadrian dictates a letter to his successor, Marcus Aurelius, detailing what he has learned in life. Every line is a bit of poetry that one is reluctant to let go off. One example: "The lover who leaves reason in control does not follow his god to the end." Buy it here. 

'The Sound and the Fury' by William Faulkner (1929)

This is a book you'll read twice before you understand it, and that you'll want to read twice more when you do. The first section — fittingly, a tale told by an idiot — signals the decline of a Southern family and the transformation of the South itself. This is prose at its most intense. Buy it here. 

'In Search of Lost Time' by Marcel Proust (1913-27)

Seven volumes of the most meticulously observed human behavior in the history of literature. Following the life journey of its unnamed narrator, the novel details the character of a specific time, and the lives that inhabited it, in ways that will bring to mind people you know, and who you are. Buy it here. 

'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf (1927)

Woolf is the virtuoso of internal dialogue. A simple planned trip to a lighthouse across the way reveals the complex relationships in a family as well as the ravages of the passing of time. The husband in this novel is a failed philosopher — too close to home for me? Buy it here. 

'Invisible Cities' by Italo Calvino (1972)

In this brief but extraordinary novel, Kublai Khan and Marco Polo sit together at twilight, the latter telling the former about the cities he has visited. But the cities he describes, bearing names such as Theodora and Zaira and Euphemia, are not actual places; instead, each one captures a moment of our world in metaphor, love, or grief. The world the pair speaks of is a dream, but a dream of the real. Buy it here.

'King Lear' by William Shakespeare (1606)

The essential Shakespeare play, notwithstanding Hamlet and Macbeth being perennial contenders. Pride before the fall; unrecognized love;  Shakespearean irony; and a fool wiser than the wise men. Lear has it all. Buy it here.

 

 

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