Brad Gooch

Brad Gooch is a writer and professor of English at William Paterson University in New Jersey. His most recent book is Godtalk: Travels in Spiritual America (Knopf, $25).

Symposium by Plato (Penguin Classics, $9). A riff on some of the same issues of erotic love as found in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, this Platonic dialogue is a “true” account of a dinner party held in Athens at the home of Agathon in 416 B.C. to celebrate his winning the equivalent of a Tony for his tragedy that season. Socrates raised the bar for the next 25 centuries in his finale of an aria on what we talk about when we talk about love.

The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton (Harcourt, $16). Thomas Merton’s autobiography tells of his conversion from a wickedly ambitious literary type in Cambridge and Manhattan to a cloistered Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky, which he entered in 1941, at age 26. Written as an act of obedience for his abbot, the transparent prose in this updated Pilgrim’s Progress proved irresistible. Merton’s resolve to erase his own ego backfired: The book went on to sell millions of copies.

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The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16). O’Connor’s stories emit a compressed feeling of having taken the most ambitious, dark themes of classical literature, blindfolded them, spun them around three times, and deposited them in a small Southern town as provincial and full of moral dilemma as the Galilee of the Gospels.

Three Poems by John Ashbery (out of print). Frank O’Hara once bragged of one of his poems: “It is even in / prose. I am a real poet.” John Ashbery pushed this sentiment over the cliff in Three Poems, which are three masterworks in prose, free falls of meditation.

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (Ballantine Books, $21). Deceptively shelved under “Young Adult,” this complex fantasy-adventure trilogy is the thinking kid’s Harry Potter. Instead of pimpled Harry, we get a brainy preteen heroine, Lyra Belacqua. You’ve got to love a contemporary writer who dares to take on string theory, original sin, and Socrates’ personal daemon, no matter what the genre.

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