If you're a philosophy student and you want to keep reading over the summer months, here's
my advice.
First, read what you want to read, not what you feel like you have to read.
Don't consider that having a big block of time obligates you to finally read the Prima
Secundae or begin the Critique of Pure Reason.
Read things that you have a strong desire to read and things that you will feel good
about having read when you finish them.
My second piece of advice is to read fiction, ideally read novels.
I think there's a nice balance to be struck between reading philosophy during the school
year and then reading novels and good quality fiction during your breaks.
There's a way of developing both the intellect and the emotions and the
affective life and the imagination in tandem.
I think reading novels also expands your horizons, gives you access to other areas of human experience.
It develops your moral imagination and this capacity for imaginative sympathy with other
people in other places and times and circumstances that I think is really vital to living a good
life today.
As for specific novels, I can always of course recommend the seven novels of Jane Austen
as really first-rate.
Nero Wolfe, whenever somebody asked him if he read novels, would always reply, “Yes,
I've read all seven of them,” meaning that no other books are worthy of the name.
I'm sure that if you pick up Emma or Persuasion or Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility
this summer you'll be richly rewarded.
If you like 20th century novels, from my own experience I can recommend Willa Cather's
novel The Professor's House, a fairly short novel dealing with friendship and betrayal
and the way that time changes us as people.
Of course, Cather's novel Death Comes for the Archbishop is on most Catholic book lists
and it also is excellent.
Both those novels containing really vivid portraits of the American Southwest and its
landscape and people.
If you're going to read philosophy, my recommendation is to start with things that are relatively
small, that you can read in a sitting or two.
I think one great series in this regard is the series of short works from Joseph Pieper
put out by Ignatius Press.
I've got a few on my shelf, I'll show them to you.
These are all really excellent and very thought-provoking, I think quite rich in their material.
Abuse of Language Abuse of Power by Josef Pieper, Only the Lover Sings, Hope and History,
A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, The End of Time, Guide to Thomas Aquinas:
these are all excellent books and I think any one of these is small enough to fit in
a bag to take to the beach or read by the poolside and will provide a great deal of
good intellectual stimulation over the summer.
There are a lot of great things to think about in Pieper.
One other book that I can recommend from my own reading is A.G. Sertillanges’ book The
Intellectual Life, which I think is good not only for the recommendations it makes about
the life of the student, but even good in a kind of way as being a guide to the spiritual
life for the intellectual.
So I think I've got that on my shelf back here.
That's it.
So, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, and Methods, translated from the French.
This is really a very good little book and if you're interested in something new, it's
not quite philosophy but not quite fiction.
This I think is a very good guide to life and I can strongly recommend it.
So, that's my quick advice to my students and to you about books to read over the summer
for philosophy students and others.
If you have any advice or questions or any additional books to recommend, please put
them in the comments down below.
Thanks for watching today; goodbye.