Three books about what it's all about

At their invitation, I wrote up this little spiel for NPR's "Three Books" feature on their website. They declined to post it on the grounds that it is "pretentious". So here you go -- a little pretentiousness to get you through the night. I highly recommend all three of these books.

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Three books about what it’s all about
By Andrew Potter

We live in a world dominated by the fraudulent, the prepackaged and the artificial. From fast food to “reality” TV, Lady Gaga to James Frey, lying politicians to the bad faith of our Facebook “friends”, we are awash in fakery and illusion. Emerging out of this bleak cultural landscape is a movement centered on the notion of “authenticity”: the honest, the natural, the real. This is the growing search for the essential core of life, and finding the authentic has become the foremost spiritual quest of our time.

Except more often than not, the search for the authentic causes the very problems it was designed to solve. From organic produce to eco-tourism, from the cult of Oprah to the obsession with Obama, what seemed authentic ends up looking like just another marketing strategy, or another public mask that hides the truth beneath.

We need a new approach. Here are three books, all by philosophers of a sort, that begin with discussions of mundane or technical topics in disparate fields, only to get us to a place that shows us how the trick is not to solve our deepest spiritual anxieties, but rather to help our minds get to a space where the problems simply dissolve.

The Tao is Silent, by Raymond M. Smullyan, paperback, 240 pages, HarperOne, list price $14.00

What’s the difference between China and the West? In the West, we take naps, while Chinese people simply sleep when they are tired. That’s one of the first and best insights of this delightful little book. Smullyan is a logician by profession, who also happens to be a magician, a concert pianist, and Taoist philosopher. He integrates all of these in a way that plays off the tensions and affinities between Western and Eastern ways of thinking about the world. The highlight of the book is an extended dialogue between God and a Mortal, which dances over questions of free will, the non-religious origins of morality, and why children are such great philosophers.


Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, by Douglas R. Hofstadter, paperback, 832 pages,  Basic Books, list price $29.95

Hofstadter is best known as the wunderkind author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize at the age of 34. But I prefer this long and extraordinary book that is nominally about the nature of translation, but which takes the reader on a delirious look at the underlying “patterns” that are the essence of music, poetry, humour, typography, and artificial intelligence. Always lurking over the reader’s shoulder is the knowledge that the book is dedicated to the memory of Hofsatder’s wife, Carol, who died suddenly in 1993 from a brain tumor. The bittersweet result is that we are brought, inadvertently, to a theory of immortality: All life is a pattern, and Carol lives on in the multiple ways her life pattern is intertwined with those whom she knew and loved.

Catch and Release: Trout Fishing and the Meaning of Life, by Mark Kingwell, 256 pages, paperback, Penguin, list price $15.00


Mark Kingwell is a Canadian philosopher who has written books on political philosophy, aesthetics, architecture, and booze. But probably his best book is this memoir of sorts, built around a fishing trip to Kelowna, British Columbia that Kingwell took a few years ago with his father and two brothers. The trip begins with Mark the Skeptic declaring, “I will not fish,” and it ends a few days later with the philosopher soundly converted to the Brotherhood of the Angle. Along the way, Kingwell uses the intersection of writing, fishing and philosophy to work out familiar philosophical problems about the relationship between thought and action, skill and consciousness, and the deep existential problem of procrastination. Ultimately, we are left with a sort of Zen koan as written by Izaak Walton:

Q. What is the meaning of life?

A. Let’s go fishing!