《每日电讯报》年度好书
思想类

ideas – polemics, essays, philosophical tracts – exposed sloppy thinking and imagined a bolder, richer, more intelligent world. They just might change your mind, and gladden your heart.

1 Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever
by Lamorna Ash

2 Reparations
by Nigel Biggar

3 Open Socrates
by Agnes Callard

4 Winter Dreams
by Barbara H Rosenwein

The ancients also knew plenty about old age and how we should approach it. In this fascinating history of the elderly, Rosenwein returns to the classical world to explore how Cicero, Euripides and Sophocles presented the winter of our lives – which, it transpires, was with rather more fullness and humanity than people show today.

5
The Extinction of Experience
by Christine Rosen

If you have a smartphone, destroy it immediately. Rosen’s compelling book looks at the technology we now carry everywhere, and argues that outsourcing our minds to algorithms, platforms and convenient systems has left us coddled and weak. Before long, she warns, we’ll lose the ability to see the world afresh.

6
It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me
by Philippa Snow

Another of our smartest young essayists tackles the pitfalls of fame, in this brutal and brilliant study of female celebrity. Snow pairs one elder and one younger figure in each chapter – Lindsay Lohan and Elizabeth Taylor; Britney Spears and Aaliyah – anatomising their downfalls with wit.

7 On Bull---t
by Harry Frankfurt
republished after nearly 40 years

8 Against Identity
by Alexander Douglas

Drawing on the Christian philosopher René Girard and a wide battery of examples, Douglas mounts an engrossing attack on individualism of all stripes.

9 A Philosophy of Shame
by Frédéric Gros, tr Andrew James Bliss

It’s often said that we live in a “post-shame culture”. But do we? And either way, is that a desirable thing? In this neat and erudite little book, whirling through literary, religious, historical, cinematic and psychoanalytic touchstones, Gros tackles the paradoxes of this most excruciating of feelings.

10 I Suffer Therefore I Am
by Pascal Bruckner, tr Stephen Muecke

Self-pity, blubbering, complaints: a French philosopher argues that suffering has become too powerful a force in Western culture, and such masochism, based on ersatz guilt, will be our ruin. “Composure,” Bruckner declares, “is one of the faces of heroism.” Read him and, whatever you do, don’t weep.