Sosseh Assaturian:
Happiness and Hardship by Seneca (Translations by Elaine Fantham, Harry M. Hine, James Ker, and Gareth D. Williams)
This is an accessible, scholarly edition of a collection of Seneca's essays that impart Stoic wisdom for living a happy, meaningful life while navigating a difficult world. The first half of the collection comprises Seneca's famous consolation letters, which deal with personal loss and grief, while the second half deals with navigating practical matters such as interpersonal and social hardship, reconciling our instinctive values with our learned ones, balancing professional duties with leisure, and achieving happiness and tranquility by living in accordance with the nature of the world.
Wrong Norma by Anne Carson
Wrong Norma is Carson's most recent prose poetry collection. My favourite piece is 'Oh What a Night'— a playful adaptation of Alcibiades' speech from Plato's Symposium, rendered in Carson's characteristic sharp and textured translation style.
Marc Cohen:
I've Been Thinking by Daniel C. Dennett
Dan Dennett died last month, after an incredibly prolific and influential philosophical career. This memoir, published just last fall, recounts his amazingly eventful life. For anyone who came up in philosophy in the '60s and '70s, as I did (Dan and I were near contemporaries) this is a must-read. It's full of tales and gossip about so many philosophers that our cohort knew or at least rubbed elbows with. And even for younger philosophers in the analytic tradition it will provide a great first-hand history of late 20th and early 21st century philosophy. Some may find parts of the book (especially the last third) a bit more self-congratulatory than they'd like, but in my view Dan had a lot to be congratulated for, and I found that tendency a small price to pay. And, as anyone who's read any of his many books and articles knows, he's a very gifted prose stylist. This is a great read.
Sara Goering:
The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No by Carl Elliott
Elliot is a great philosopher/bioethicist and fantastic storyteller. This book is a collection of case studies in bioethics whistleblowing, and promises to be both riveting and appalling in what it uncovers. As one review notes, it is a “disturbingly eye-opening read.”
Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia by Kate Manne
This book is pitched as philosophy/biography/memoir, and has feminist philosopher Kate Manne (Down Girl and Entitled) turning her attention to analyzing the harms of fat oppression and size discrimination.
Charles Ives:
Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit by Alexandre Kojève
The Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (trans. Fuss and Dobbins)
For anyone who has ever wanted to read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit without having to read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Kojève might be your guy. I taught excerpts from it last quarter and loved it. Also, for anyone who has ever wanted to actually read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, the new translation by Fuss and Dobbins is great. It is certainly the most accessible one I've come across. In sum, neither of these two works feels like the terrible Hegel I have been avoiding for the entirety of my adult life.
Carole Lee:
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Morals, Oliver Burkeman
I enjoyed reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Morals. It was just mentioned in a NY Times article on “8 productivity books time-management experts actually use.” Burkeman’s wikipedia page describes it as a “self-help book on the philosophy and psychology of time management and happiness."
José Mendoza
The Expanse, James S.A. Corey
These are science fiction novels that have recently been adapted into an Amazon Prime TV series. I want to read these before watching the show. The first book of this series is titled Leviathan Wakes, so they got me hooked just with the opening title!
Rose Novick:
A, by Louis Zukofsky
One of the great American modernist long poems, difficult and thorny and densely referential as all the modernist epics are, but sustained by an unparalleled musicality. A poem that is, as it says itself, "A / Round of fiddles playing Bach..."