Sophie's World

Normally I lead a charmed life; the world is usually my oyster. Occasionally, however, things go just a teensy-weensy bit wrong. That was the case the day before I got this book; one annoying thing led to another and I left work that night hoping only to make it back to my apartment without someone calling me Kenneth and inquiring about the frequency. It may be for such bad days that Sophie's World was written.

Subtitled A Novel About the History of Philosophy, Sophie's World is framed as the story of a 14-year-old girl who is the recipient of mysterious letters that present her with the history of Western philosophy. It was written by Jostein Gaarder, a former high school philosophy teacher in Norway, and though it was marketed for young people, adults made it a best-seller in Scandinavia. Gaarder takes you on a journey from Socrates to Sartre, and there is an eerie subplot involving some puzzling postcards sent to Sophie but addressed to a mystery girl exactly her age. Sophie's detective-like quest to learn the other girl's identity is a metaphor for figuring out her own place in the world and makes what could have been too academic a book into a page turner.

Even if you took a freshman course in philosophy, Sophie's World is like a nice trip back to the dorm room. Most people, Gaarder's philosophy teacher tells Sophie, ''get so caught up in everyday affairs that their astonishment at the world gets pushed into the background.'' This book contains a novel mantra for those days when the world gets in your face. As one of Gaarder's characters muses mildly, ''It's a strange thought that we live on a tiny little planet in the universe.'' A-