Ten Novels of Philosophical Musing
(A friend and I were discussing a recent widely acclaimed—but poor—novel, and this list is the result. It’s an attempt to recommend ten books that pursue the same mission that other one does, only competently: novels and a couple of story collections motivated less by plot and character than by the desire to spin fantasy together with philosophy and weave a cosmological fable out of them. They’re arranged alphabetically by author.)
Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino
The Crab Nebula by Éric Chevillard
The Silk Road by Kathryn Davis
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman
Kleinzeit by Russell Hoban
Jesus Christs by A. J. Langguth
The Fool and Other Moral Tales by Anne Serre
The Neighborhood by Gonçalo M. Tavares
Byobu by Ida Vitale
Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson
— November 21, 2022