Staff favorites, continued

Wondering what the Fogelson Library staff enjoys reading?

Here are two suggestions from Laura Smith.

Montaigne 

More than 400 years after his death, this 16th-century skeptic and humanist still reads as fresh, relevant, and wise.  He invented the essay, and arguably the memoir; his works are short, engaging, and endlessly fascinating.  He is an essayist in the original sense of the word—an attempter, an experimenter, a maker of lists.  He writes about everything: from sex, death, and religion, science and education, to drunkenness, cannibals, and pants – he even has a whole essay about thumbs.  Well-versed in the classics, he intersperses his own thoughts and experiences with tales and opinions from contemporaneous and ancient sources.  His philosophy is summed up in his famous motto, Que scay-je? (What do I know?).   To him, philosophy is not silly thought experiments or tedious investigations into the nature of reality.  Philosophy is simply learning how to live and learning how to die.  As such, he’s absolutely my favorite philosopher.

Persuasion by Jane Austen

The greatest novel by the greatest English novelist of all time.




Check out a copy at Fogelson Library.  See the displays on the main floor.