Chuck Klosterman writes The Ethicist for the magazine.

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Book I’m reading now:

“Stanley Kubrick: A Biography” by John Baxter. I saw the documentary “Room 237″ at the New York Film Festival and decided I should read a Kubrick biography. I get the sense that this is not the definitive chronicle of the director’s life, but it seemed like the most immediately accessible version. I just started it last night — thus far, all I’ve learned is what kind of camera Kubrick preferred as a teenager (and what kind of jazz he liked, and why he loved chess).

Last book I loved:

“My Struggle: Book One,” by Karl Knausgaard. Now, I don’t want to give the impression that I read a lot of high-end Norwegian memoirs, because that would be misleading. In fact, this might be the only Norwegian book I’ve ever read, and I’m not even sure what prompted me to read this one (I must have seen something on the Internet and unconsciously decided it might be interesting). But it was amazing. It’s probably the best book about the experience of being a writer I’ve stumbled across since “All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers.” I’ve since learned that “My Struggle” is extremely controversial in Scandinavia, partly because of the title but mostly because some critics feel Knausgaard was too brutally honest about his family’s interior life (a large chunk of the narrative deals with the author’s father, who drank himself to death). But that was my favorite part.

Unread book on my bedside table that gnaws at my conscience:

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There are two — Roy Jenkins’s “Churchill,” (1,002 pages) and Dr. Li Zhisui’s “ The Private Life of Chairman Mao” (682 pages). I’m extremely interested in both of these men, but these books require the kind of commitment I struggle with. I prefer books that I can read in three days. They’re excellent objects to keep on the night stand, however: if I’m ever the victim of home invasion, they’d both make world-class projectiles. I’m pretty sure I could kill a man with “Churchill.”

Book that most people would assume is boring that is actually not:

Again, I have two — “Justice,” by Michael J. Sandel, and “The Fourth Dimension,” by Rudy Rucker. These books are not remotely connected in terms of topic (the first is about philosophy and the second is about levels of reality), but they each illustrate clear, creative ways to think about difficult, abstract problems. And they’re funny (although not in a way that’s distracting or cheap).

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Book I would recommend to absolutely anyone:

This might backfire, but I would nominate Padgett Powell’s “The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?” I suppose some might find this book “unsatisfying,” as it is (literally) nothing but questions; every sentence in the entire novel concludes with a question mark. There is no plot and only one character. But I can’t imagine the person who could read this book without thinking more about the meaning of his or her own life, which is (probably) the best reason for reading anything.