This month we continue our exploration of the Dewey Decimal System. We'll look at the 100s, home to philosophy, psychology, logic and ethics, as well as astrology, pop-psychology and self-help.

Last month, I confessed to an appalling literary deficiency, which I hope to rectify in the coming year. This month, I'll cop to a sad lack of knowledge about philosophy, no doubt the result of having avoided the liberal arts as much as possible while getting my Biology degree. If only I'd had Thomas Cathcart's and Daniel Klein's "understanding philosophy through jokes" books, I might very well have switched majors. Cathcart and Klein, both studied philosophy at Harvard and teamed up to write Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, a humorous introduction to philosophy. In their second book, Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates, they use philosophy and humor to "explore life, death, the afterlife, and everything in between."

If you like your philosophy sans the slapstick, Dominique Janicaud's A Beginner's Guide to Philosophy might just fit the bill. Wanting to instill a love of philosophy in his daughter but dissatisfied with the impenetrability of many of the philosophy primers he read, Janicaud decided to write his own introductory text. It's divided into 30 short chapters, one for each day of the month, and covers the basics tenets of Western philosophy in a highly readable format.

On a more somber note, poet, essayist and Michigan funeral director, Thomas Lynch, takes on the topic of death in his collection of essays, Bodies at Motion and at Rest. As someone who spends his life among the dead, he has much wisdom to offer the living about both life and death. NOVA produced an excellent documentary about Lynch's family funeral home, entitled The Undertaking. Although not housed in the 100s, it's available on DVD from the Library.

According to www.deadlysins.com, the problem faced by humankind to come up with a system to conceptualize its own spiritual shortcoming was a formidable one: "the system had to be complex and inclusive enough to implicate a vast range of disgusting behavior, yet simple and memorable enough to inspire guilt in an illiterate peasant." While much has been written about sin through the ages, the folks at Oxford University Press have provided perhaps the best introduction to the topic with their cogent and congenial Seven Deadly Sins books series. My favorites? Lust by Simon Blackburn; Gluttony by Francine Prose; Greed by Phyllis Tickle and Sloth by Wendy Wasserstein.

According to a 2005 Gallup poll, three-quarters of Americans believe in paranormal activity - haunted houses, UFOs, mental telepathy, reincarnation, etc. If you're a skeptic or, like Special Agent Fox Mulder you want to believe, you'll enjoy perusing the pages of The Paranormal, edited by Kenneth Partridge. Part of The Reference Shelf series published by H.W. Wilson, this collection of article reprints is an entertaining and surprisingly well-balanced look at paranormal activity.

Talk with your local librarian or feel free to do some aimless browsing for additional 100s titles.

More 100s
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Infinite Book and The Book of Nothing by John D. Barrow
The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas
Luck: The Brilliant of Randomness of Everyday Life by Nicholas Rescher
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief by Lewis Wolpert
SuperSense: Why We believe in the Unbelievable by Bruce M. Hood
Unseen World by Rubert Matthews, et al.

For Fiction Readers
Children of God by Mary Doria Russell
Compass of the Heart: A Novel of Discovery by Priscilla Cogan
The Face by Angela Hunt
A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy by Charlotte Greig
Headhunter by Timothy Findley
A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin
If Minds had Toes by Lucy Eyre
The Philosopher's Apprentice by James Morrow
Pinocchio in Venice by Robert Cover

You can check out these titles and many more at any Jefferson County Public Library location.