New books to kick off the fall semester!


For some people, August means vacations and beaches.  But perhaps some of you want to start planning for Your best year ever: a 5-step plan for achieving your most important goals.  Publisher alert: If only there were a shortcut involving a one-step plan for your five best years.  Sign me up!

If one of your most important goals for the coming year involves finally showing philosophy who is the boss, we certainly have the right book for you:  Taking back philosophy: a multicultural manifesto.  If taking back philosophy is as exhausting as taking back the items you bought during your Black Friday shopping binge, you might want to start budgeting like a dot.com billionaire.  How to turn down a billion dollars: the Snapchat story will undoubtedly help you get a good deal on that personal jet with all that extra money you’re saving.  Or maybe you’ll want to take a more fiscally conservative view before smashing the piggy bank and read Finance for normal people: how investors and markets behave while you’re riding the bus to work.

No one wants to admit how much time they spend online.  I’m sure we all only spend 10-20 minutes per day, and that’s a generous estimate.  Ursula K. LeGuin wrote about No time to spare: thinking about what matters in her last book, and I don’t know about you, but I’m glad to hear that she believes "How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us." Show me the money!

Moving on from the main course, could we interest you in one of our tasty desserts?  We can recommend The bad food bible: how and why to eat sinfully and the chef’s specialty: The perfect cake: your ultimate guide to classic, modern, and whimsical cakes.  Want to know why it’s midnight, and you’re mindlessly eating carbs?  Why you eat what you eat: the science behind our relationship with food might clear things up. 

If you’re worried that someone is watching you indulge in that guilt-free dessert that you certainly, positively, absolutely deserve, you may be right.  Don’t look behind you, but there is a book on the shelf called Under surveillance: being watched in modern America.  Why worry about strangers judging you when the government will do it more efficiently?

Do you find that you’re running short on cuts?  Cuts of what – meat?  Could it be?  No, it’s A thousand cuts: the bizarre underground world of collectors and dealers who saved the movies.  If saving movies doesn’t interest you because you’re too busy wondering where this blog entry is going, Passing judgment: praise and blame in everyday life could be the book you’re looking for.  As the saying goes, it’s better to pass a class than pass judgment.