John Cowper Powys’ Autobiography (1934),his greatest work of fiction. He admits near the end that he’s treated himself as one of the fictional characters in his novels, embellishing memories to get at some truths about himself.

He made a living on the popular lecture circuit in early 20th-century USA, debating Bertrand Russell among others. But his ‘lecturing’ seems to have been more like performance art (according to Henry Miller), and he seems to have relished the prevalent academic branding of him as a ‘charlatan.’

His own philosophy seemed to be panpsychism with a fundamental dualism between good and evil. He doesn’t pretend to have been that ethical, confessing to a sadism that he’s long struggled to contain. 

He often comes across as a pompous windbag, endlessly spinning out his twisting sentences. In fact, I decided to stick with the book as a treatment for my internet-diminished attention span — Can I stagger through these tortuous sentences, tracking every last clause and em-dashed allusion, and distill some nugget of meaning?

The latter part of the book features some essayistic writing on the USA’s culture. E.g., “I wholly disapprove of the American custom of allowing policemen to take upon themselves to punish offenders before they appear before a magistrate. In some ways, no doubt, there is more “yield” and “give” in an American prison than in an English one; but I cannot help feeling there is also more opportunity for individual sadism.” He also remarks on “a certain crude alliance, which I have noticed cropping up now and again in America, between big business and the mob, a thing that always struck me as a peculiarly barbarous and dangerous sign, an alliance in fact between the noisy enemies and the insidious enemies of the dignity and decency of life.”

Friends and colleagues started a faculty book club around 25 years ago, and we read mostly fiction meeting several times a year. Great for me–I read hundreds of books that I never would have otherwise.

Of late I can recommend Percival Everett’s James, a takeoff on Twain characters that is genuinely terrific. I loved Don Winslow’s The Final Score too, a collection of short stories involving crime from very different perspectives (the final story is being made into a movie starring Jake Gyllenhall). I’ve read everything by Jess Walter–you can’t go wrong with any title by him–Over Tumbled Graves is a great one, and Beautiful Ruins is a true masterpiece.

If you’re looking for something short, elegantly written, and with some philosophical themes as an added bonus, Julian Barnes’s new book, Departure(s), is one of the best books I’ve read this summer. Another is Percival Everett’s The Trees — though I should note that in addition to being longer, it’s quite gruesome and disturbing, kind of a mix of detective fiction, horror, and commentary on racism past and present (the title refers to trees used in lynchings). And while some of my favorite contemporary writers are often described as having “Hemingwayesque” prose, I realized that I hadn’t actually read anything by Hemingway since high school and had never read The Old Man and the Sea. So I read it this summer and will just say: there’s a reason that’s a classic. If you’re like me and largely stick with contemporary fiction, take a chance on an older book that has some affinity with contemporary works you like.

I recently read Maxim Biller’s Mama Odessa. It is semi-autobiographical, though fictionalized. It was an engaging book, telling the story of his mother’s passing, with many reflections on being a child of displaced eastern European/Soviet intellectuals living in Germany (and West Germany). (Disclosure: I read the book in neither German nor English). HIGHY RECOMMENDED

As a big sci-fi genrehead I’d recommend Peter Watts’s Blindsight and Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. Sci-fi fans will probably have already read one or both, but even non-sci-fi-ing philosophers will likely get a kick out of their wildly different explorations of identity and consciousness. Also: there’s never a bad time to read William Gibson’s Neuromancer for the first time.

Currently re-reading Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which I mention not out of any particularly philosophical interest but just because I’m having a lovely time with it.

I’ve been reading novels by the Korean author and Nobel Prize winner Han Kang, and especially recommend Greek Lessons and The Vegetarian. Her writing style (as translated) is unique, elusive, poetic, evocative, and it conjures up forms of experience that are quite alien, such as a woman who has lost the ability to speak and sees words and language as structures that block reality, and another woman who believes she is a tree. Greek Lessons is particularly enigmatic and philosophical, with the woman who can’t speak studying Ancient Greek with a teacher who is going blind. He left Korea as a child with his family when they moved to Germany, and he grew up and went to university there, where he got a Ph.D. in Ancient Greek philosophy. There are a lot of allusions to Plato. Almost everyone I know who has read Greek Lessons immediately re-reads it because it’s so challenging to figure out what is really happening.