Review: Sophie's World

Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I would rate this higher were it just for the philosophy introduction- actually, I'd recommend it for that anyway. As someone who never took a philosophy course or formally learned the history of philosophy, this book was really informative, especially with the manner in which it draw links between the different philosophers and their philosophies across time. It helps give perspective into why these people started thinking the way they did and makes you realize that philosophy itself doesn't take place in a vacuum; it's a conversation across different time periods and cultures, with people reacting to each other and the ideas of the past. The explanations also are fairly easy to grasp in layman's terms, considering that Sophie's just a naive 15 year old girl who doesn't know any better. I'd imagine reading something like Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy as an intro would be way more dense and harder to digest for a first timer.

That said... the subtitle of this book is that it's a novel first and foremost. And I probably read this ten years too late for it to leave a good impression on me, but the novel part of the book was really aggravating to get through. I mean, Sophie just wouldn't shut up. She'd keep interrupting the discussion with complaints and asking her teacher to hurry up cause she needed to go home soon while being all exasperated about how backwardly misogynistic and not woman-friendly some philosophers/ies were, not to mention the random hate on Berkeley. Not to say that some of her complaints weren't justified, but her reaction about it was just really juvenile. I understand this book would probably best target teenagers, but still, I think it ought to be possible to cater to teenagers in a way that doesn't also alienate older readers, especially on a subject like philosophy.

The actual plot of the book itself meandered a bit from repetitive to mildly interesting to meta-fictional to bizarrely almost absurdist towards the end. At some points I was wondering if certain events were happening to illustrate a philosophical point or if really just to be random and nonsensical, because a lot of the time it definitely felt like the latter case. I didn't really care too much for the rest of the book once the last philosophy had been covered, after which there were still several more chapters of plot and resolution to go.

Probably would've been a great book to read at a younger age, but for now, it's kinda hard for me to say whether the aggravations of the novel justify getting through it for just the philosophy coverage. But you could probably just skip around to those parts anyway if you really wanted to.