My close friend and former colleague, Kerry Walters, just posted a version of the 'five books' question on Facebook: 'Besides religious scripture, which five books would you choose as central to the well-lived life?' 

I chose, in no particular order:
1) Spinoza's Ethics
2) Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain
3) Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov
4) Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
5) Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra

If I could be permitted a runner-up (or two), I'd also list Søren Kierkegaard's Works of Love, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's What is Philosophy?

What about you? 

I'd be lying if I said I weren't envious of the speed and quality with which Nail writes! Here's his latest, due out with Edinburgh University Press next year. 

From the website: 

The most original and shocking interpretation of Lucretius in the last 40 years

Thomas Nail argues convincingly and systematically that Lucretius was not an atomist, but a thinker of kinetic flux. In doing so, he completely overthrows the interpretive foundations of modern scientific materialism, whose philosophical origins lie in the atomic reading of Lucretius' immensely influential book De Rerum Natura.

This means that Lucretius was not the revolutionary harbinger of modern science as Greenblatt and others have argued; he was its greatest victim. Nail re-reads De Rerum Natura to offer us a new Lucretius--a Lucretius for today.

Read the Introduction and TOC here.

This past semester, I taught my Intro to Philosophy course as a course on 'God, Death, and the Meaning of Life.' One of the texts we read was Simone de Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death, which chronicles her own experiences with the death of her mother. This text is profoundly moving, and I return to it on this day: 'When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets. Her death brings to light her unique quality; she grows as vast as the world that her absence annihilates for her and whose whole existence was caused by her being there; you feel that she should have had more room in your life - all the room, if need be.'

It's been two years since I lost my mother. It was a Thursday evening, and I had just finished screening the film Match Point for my Dostoevsky seminar, when the text messages began to come in. My aunt texted me the following words: "Hey I am so sorry. You need anything let me know", and the dread overtook me. I knew that something very bad must have happened, not just because of the tenor of the message, but also because my aunt very rarely texts me at all. Then I heard my wife pacing outside the classroom, and it was ultimately my wife who told me that she had passed. Two years later, and it's still such a strange feeling. The sense of loss and of absence - that sense of a hole in one's identity - never really goes away (or at least it hasn't for me yet); you just get more accustomed to it. 

                                               ‘…Je vous aime et vous souris d’où que je sois.’

                                      ‘… I love you and am smiling at you from wherever I am.’

                                                                    —Jacques Derrida

As of today, it's official! Deleuze and Derrida: Difference and the Power of the Negative is going to production! Looking forward to seeing the finished project sometime in 2018!