Sophie's World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy

1/2 The premise is odd from the beginning and the characters unrealistically go along with it. The plot itself is not just boring and plain, but throughout the last third of the book it actually gets annoying. I always found interesting the idea of a novel inside another novel / metafiction and I read books that executed this very well. But in this book, it's more like... “Oh, look at me! The characters I'm writing about in my story are wondering why I'm writing about them in the story that I'm currently writing!”.

2/2 The philosophy part of this book was ok - a good introduction, explained in a way that should be accessible to everybody, particularly people who do not know that much about philosophy. There is only one thing I disliked about this part (which I also saw mentioned in some other reviews): around the 19th century philosphy, the course seems to digress into less philosophical subjects (Darwin, Freud, Marx) and some bits seem to support an agenda that could have been otherwise skipped and wouldn't have changed the content too much. Also, Sofia has loads of inserts regarding feminism and I, as a woman, think that was stupid and unnecessary.