The Books Briefing: How Writers Try On New Perspectives

📚All Our Names, by Dinaw Mengestu

📚Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih

What Tracy K. Smith finds in America

“Smith invites her readers to see America, and the world around them, via the eyes of a generous and attentive observer, whether weeping ‘through a movie starring Angelina Jolie’ in one poem, or watching a mentally ill man stopping traffic ‘as if he hears / a voice in our idling engines’ in another. ”

📚Wade in the Water, by Tracy K. Smith

What writers can gain from seeing the world through different eyes

“Part of establishing point of view is knowing what to omit. (One of the hallmarks of bad historical fiction is describing everyday details with the sociologist’s eye.)”

📚 The Tusk That Did the Damage, by Tania James

📚 True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey

Why study philosophy? “To challenge your own point of view.”

“People take literature seriously, especially in moral philosophy, as thought experiments. A lot of the most developed and effective thought experiments come from novels.”

📚 Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

📚 The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant

An uncomfortable trick for honest writing: staring at strangers

“How often do we turn away from knowing another person as fully as we could, avoiding even the eyes of the people we’re closest to? And how often do we hide ourselves, afraid of being really looked into and seen?”

📚 Kinder Than Solitude, by Yiyun Li

📚 The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen

The Reference Desk

(New York Public Library)

This week’s question comes from Gary, a member of the “Breakfast Book Curmudgeons”:

I am challenged in choosing international fiction that will be both interesting and informative about geography, culture, or history, or all of the above. Can your book gurus help me out? First two books I chose were [Milan] Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and [Orhan] Pamuk’s My Name Is Red. Neither was well received, which is a mystery to me.

What a great name for a book club. You mention elsewhere in your note that your fellow curmudgeons are usually nonfiction readers, and if they haven’t loved the beautiful but somewhat dense and experimental prose you’ve suggested in the past, it might be time to try something that’s more in the realist vein. The Sound of Things Falling, by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, is a crime novel set in the midst of Colombia’s drug conflict that layers complex philosophical questions underneath its page-turning plot. Carol Bensimon’s We All Loved Cowboys, the story of a road trip across Brazil, pokes at its own protagonist’s blind spots about the country where she lives. You might also try A Stranger’s Pose, Emmanuel Iduma’s account of his travels throughout Africa—this hybrid of travelogue, memoir, poetry, and photography is both informative and gorgeously written, and may help ease even the most literal-minded readers among you into more literary styles.