Deep Thoughts
Feb. 15th, 2005 02:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
library_mamaI read this book for the second time while on leave. I love this book, and it is another older one. When I lived in Germany, it was still pretty new and popular, but I didn’t buy it because I was a little afraid to try to read it in German. Plus, books are much more expensive in Germany. When I was in Up With People, a host mom gave me her copy of it, full of sticky notes and scribbles in the margins. I made the mistake of loaning it to another cast member after I read it, who said she’d return it but never did. Alas! Last summer it was featured in a Borders display and so I bought a replacement copy. And what is this fabulous book, you ask? Read on!
Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaardner The novel stars fifteen-year-old Sophie Amudsen. (This leads to more existensial reflections on my part – I was 15 when the book was published; now I am 30 and Sophie is destined to remain 15 forever.) She’s a pretty ordinary teenager, when mysterious letters and packages begin arriving in her mailbox, some to her, and some to another girl who shares Sophie’s birthday and who ought to live nearby, but who isn’t in the telephone book. The packages to her are lessons in philosophy, and the novel itself is a history of philosophy – the plot mirrors Sophie’s current philosophy lesson, and we get the text of her lesson as well as what she’s doing. This manages to make a potentially dusty subject quite lively, even if it’s a little hard on the characters. By the end of the book, Sophie and her tutor have realized that they are probably only characters in a book, and are trying to find a way to wrest control of their lives from the author.
Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaardner The novel stars fifteen-year-old Sophie Amudsen. (This leads to more existensial reflections on my part – I was 15 when the book was published; now I am 30 and Sophie is destined to remain 15 forever.) She’s a pretty ordinary teenager, when mysterious letters and packages begin arriving in her mailbox, some to her, and some to another girl who shares Sophie’s birthday and who ought to live nearby, but who isn’t in the telephone book. The packages to her are lessons in philosophy, and the novel itself is a history of philosophy – the plot mirrors Sophie’s current philosophy lesson, and we get the text of her lesson as well as what she’s doing. This manages to make a potentially dusty subject quite lively, even if it’s a little hard on the characters. By the end of the book, Sophie and her tutor have realized that they are probably only characters in a book, and are trying to find a way to wrest control of their lives from the author.
