For lovers of libraries and bookstores and books in general who also happen to be students, summer is the high point of the year. There is actually time to read that new novel or old favorite, reason to buy that random volume that catches your eye from the bookstore window, freedom to dig into that list of books to read you started last September. I once spent the summer in a sublet that belonged to a graduate student in the English department, and the sublet came with a library I still dream about. I spent that summer devouring what little I could (a pitifully small amount).

Most of what I read was the kind of stuff you’re “supposed” to read to be well-rounded and literate and cool like that. But there are always new and wonderful and crazy books to be read, so we are pleased to bring you some random and not-so-random new titles, just in time for you to blow off your reading period work.

Read This Book

The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, by Louis Menand. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

His publisher, while bemoaning the current lack of serious and talented writers in the “man of letters” category, admitted, “There are brilliant writers—Louis Menand is perhaps the all-around best.” A staff writer at The New Yorker and Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Menand’s Metaphysical Club is a triumph of intelligent writing. He addresses a set of divinely elegant themes that speak to the very essence of what so many of us either take for granted or truly struggle with in our studies.

Menand sets out to illuminate the development of American “ways of thinking” from the Civil War into the 20th century. The key word is pragmatism, and Menand’s account of the development of modern American thought will inspire and enlighten readers of all academic stripes. The starting point is the Metaphysical Club that met in Cambridge, Mass. for a few brief months in 1872, but the tale goes far beyond that place and moment in time. Menand combines rich and detailed stories of individual American thinkers with wide-ranging and fascinating accounts of larger intellectual and social contexts and movements. The idea is that ideas are tools used to negotiate our way through the world, rather than certainties to be relied upon absolutely.

The Metaphysical Club is technically a history book, but it is intellectual and cultural history at its finest. Its direct and immediate relevance to questions of how ideas are used make it so much more than a mere history book. If the book has a flaw, it is that Menand is not willing to argue the seemingly obvious larger significance of his work very forcefully. Each chapter stands on its own as a coherent and fascinating read, but Menand isn’t heavy-handed about making sure we understand all of the connections between his intricate arguments perfectly. The reader is largely left on his or her own to realize just how amazing and important these philosophical and epistemological assumptions really were (and still are), and just how wonderfully conceived and executed The Metaphysical Club really is. The book is simply beautiful, in its prose and its ambitions. It will be deservedly adored by all who care about how ideas about ideas tangibly affect the way we see and live in the world.