Brilliance is a dime a dozen at Yale; so is publication. Professors write startlingly insightful treatises all the time—and that’s not to even start on the dozens (hundreds?) or dissertations Yale PhD’s release every year. But academic books are hardly fun reads (except, perhaps, to already-devoted acolytes of certain cultic professors). So it’s actually nice, though by no means shocking, when a Yale-related person writes a book I want to read. Just in time for summer, here are two such books:

Matterhorn, which actually came out in April, was written over a 30 years by a Yale- and Vietnam War-vet, Karl Marlantes. I’m not a big Vietnam War fan (take that as you will), so I approached the book with a bit of skepticism, but any doubt I had was cast aside when I saw this:

Chapter after chapter, battle after battle, Marlantes pushes you through what may be one of the most profound and devastating novels ever to come out of Vietnam — or any war. It’s not a book so much as a deployment, and you will not return unaltered.

Another review rather non-chalantly compared it to The Naked and the Dead and The Iliad. And it’s been a mainstay on the Times Bestseller list since its release, so you know it’s not going to be turgid or unreadable or anything. Bottom line: read it. After the Millenium Trilogy, if you must, but there’ s a lot of summer left.

The second book is helping convince me Harold may soon be dethroned as the most prominent Bloom on campus—by Psych professor Paul (sorry, not quite yet, Michael). His new How Pleasure Works hasn’t been quite as big a seller as Marlantes’s book, but it’s made a respectable showing (low triple digits on the Amazon bestseller list), and it, too, got a positive review from the Times (“No advice here about how to become happier by organizing your closets; Bloom is after something deeper than the mere stuff of feeling good.”) And hey—maybe reading it will help me figure out why I so loathe psychology classes!