Tamler Sommers: Reading Outside The Discipline

I teach philosophy at U of H (The University of Houston).

I am currently reading The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Reading The Great Brain books by John D. Fitzgerald over and over again.

10-12 year-olds: Wonder by R.J. Palacio. It was my daughter’s favorite book for a long time. High school: The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino because it’s beautiful and can introduce them to novel ways of understanding meaning and purpose. College: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole because it’s the funniest book ever written. And The Odyssey by Homer because it’s beautiful, fun, and perfectly structured. And everything by Tolstoy because he was the best.

When I read Jacques the Fatalist and his Master by Denis Diderot in college. That book influenced me in so many ways, although it took me another 10 years to realize that I wanted to pursue philosophy as a profession.

Going door-to-door in Boston to get donations for MASSPIRG – an environmental organization. It was much too cult-like for me.

Read The History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell.

Definitely not. The internet has sabotaged my ability to focus, it’s embarrassing. I’m trying every hack I come across to limit the damage. The best of them is meditation and also a program called “Freedom” that blocks me from getting online.

It depends on the subfield they’re interested in. Honestly, I’d recommend reading outside the discipline as much as possible. More literature, more film, more of the ancients, less technical contemporary philosophy.

I’ve read most of my favorite books at least three times. I’ve read Lolita and Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabakov five or six times each. I have a greater appreciation for books when I reread them. And my memory’s not great, so when I go back to something like War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy after 6 or 7 years, it’s almost like reading it for the first time.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, because everyone loves it. Also the early George Pelecanos books and The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham.

P.F. Strawon, Plato, and Susan Wolf.

I love old LA noir fiction – Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain. And James Ellroy more recently. Also Russian novels because they’re fun and so full of ideas.

I can’t really conceive of that world, so I don’t have a good answer. But too many of my students are living their lives without books. And so their received beliefs and values don’t get challenged as much as they should.

Kazuo Ishiguro and Dennis Lehane.

No, there will always be people who prefer the feel of a real book.

That’s a tough one – maybe Demons or The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. They both reflect the turbulent times we’re in right now.

Jacques the Fatalist and his Master by Denis Diderot made me want to be a writer and later a philosopher. I read The Moral Animal by Robert Wright and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins in my mid-twenties and they inspired me to go back to school.

Too many to list, but off the top of my head – Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel, Shame and Necessity by Bernard Williams, On the Road by Jack Kerouac (everyone should go through a Kerouac phase at some point), Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco, Electra by Sophocles, and Mark Twain’s novels.

I’d like to read more history. That’s a big embarrassing blind spot for me.

Making It Up As I Go.