In my day-to-day life I am forever saying no—to my clients at my day job, to my children, to my dogs (loudly) and to my cats (in vain), to people on Facebook who want to send me virtual geraniums or invite me to take the quiz to see which psycho historical dictator I am—and I don’t like it very much. I am, popular opinion to the contrary, a rather positive person, and I would much rather encourage others than discourage them. That’s why this column is all about recommending good books rather than panning bad ones. On the rare occasion I knock a book in print there is a compelling reason to do so; otherwise I just don’t bother with it. If a book fails to grab me or turns me off with its suckitude, I set it aside. Life is much too short to read bad books, much less write about them, and not nearly long enough to get to all the good ones. So I’d much rather use my time and energy pushing positivity, suggesting things to embrace rather than things to avoid.

It would be irresponsible of me, however, not to step in when I see people making horrible mistakes, like walking into traffic, for example, or reading The Da Vinci Code. We’re all fellow passengers on this ride, and we owe it to each other to look out for pitfalls and give good advice where we can. Like the guy at the checkout counter who tosses his credit card down and keeps talking on his phone—see, at that moment, the underpaid clerk on the other side is holding your life’s blood in his hands and you just insulted him. As your friend I have to tell you, hang up the damn phone.

If you’re looking for a job, try to dress your best even when picking up the application, because you never know if the employee giving it to you is a minion or the manager. Baseball cap? No. Flip-flops? No. Tube top exposing your back-spanning tattoo that reads “CRAZY BITCH”? A thousand times no. (This last person knows who she is.) Nothing personal—it’s just how we grownups roll.

To our little sisters, when you’re staggering out of Bourbon Street or wherever it is you people gather, try not to yell “I am SOOO drunk!” at the top of your lungs. You wouldn’t jump into a shark tank shouting “I am SOOO bleeding!” Same principle. Besides, we know you’re drunk—look at the guy you’re going home with.

And to our brothers, looking to dress themselves. We’ve all seen the commercials for Bulldog apparel at George Gibson’s, but please, don’t let your school spirit get in the way of your common sense. Glory, glory to Old Georgia, sure, but unless you’re a mall Santa, a rodeo clown, or Sammy Hagar, there is no reason for a man to wear red pants. Ever.

Just saying. Anyway, here’s some stuff that you should be looking into:

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The Beats: A Graphic History by Harvey Pekar et al, edited by Paul Buhle (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009). Biographies of the writers of the Beat Generation presented a la Pekar’s American Splendor, so the book is so hipster-friendly it hurts. The Big Three—Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs—get lengthy, if curmudgeonly, treatments from Pekar and illustrator Ed Piskor, who draws in a middle ground between Jaime Hernandez and R. Crumb that shows the flat cultural landscape the Beats railed against but also conveys the messy desperation that hounded them even in their heyday. Pekar is a knowledgeable and brutally honest scholar of the Beats, and his introduction to their work discerns between the great and the not-so-great and explains why. While certainly not a comprehensive study of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs (for that, seek out the biographies by Ann Charters, Barry Miles and Ted Morgan, respectively, and John Tytell’s Naked Angels), Pekar and Piskor’s segments are a nice introduction to their lives, influences, and the best of their work—a good place for the Beat novice to start.

Better still is the attention Pekar and Buhle pay to the lesser-read lights of the movement, particularly the contingent on the West Coast. Ginsberg’s “Howl” might not have become the career-maker that it was had he not hauled it out at the landmark reading at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, among other young turks like Michael McClure, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia. These and other major writers of the scene—Gary Snyder, LeRoi Jones, Diane Di Prima—get a respectful exposure, if not nearly lengthy enough, as well as some of the other figures who swam in the same waters: Slim Brundage, dean of the experimental art scene in Chicago; artist Jay DeFeo and the painting that killed her; Tuli Kupferberg telling his own story of his legendary band, in spite of itself, The Fugs.

The Beats were very much a boys’ club, and much of the free-love, open-road glamor of the times came at the expense of wives and girlfriends loved and left. This leads to perhaps the best piece in the book, by Pekar’s wife Joyce Brabner, who discusses the women of the scene, like Carolyn Cassady and Hettie Jones laboring to raise their own creative voices as well as their absent husbands’ children, and Jan Kerouac, who had to get a blood test before her father would let her use his name (her book Baby Driver is very good). In this and the rest of the book, we get a warts-and-all portrait of one of the most important literary and artistic movements of the last century and a worthwhile read for Beat fans old and new.

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House and Philosophy: Everybody Lies, edited by Henry Jacoby (John Wiley & Sons, 2009). There are very few subjects in this world quite as fascinating as philosophy, our eternal struggle to make sense of ourselves and the cosmos, how we understand our place and our reactions to this vast and often unfeeling universe, who and what we are. There are also very few subjects in this world that are more of a frigging mind-numbing bore to read. I’m a smart guy but nothing makes my eyes glaze over faster than discourses on epistemology and ontology. Seriously, I’d rather read about golf.

The thing is, philosophers know this about their subject, too, which is why every so often some of them let their hair down and contribute to the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series, which takes pop phenomena such as “South Park,” “Monty Python,” “Lost,” baseball or the songs of Johnny Cash and Metallica, to name a few, and explores them through a wide range of philosophical lenses. Thus the essayists provide a painless introduction to complex and abstract concepts and, conversely, show how philosophy works in our daily lives through our pastimes.

In this case, a collection of writers explore the TV show “House, M.D.” (of which I freely admit to being a drooling fanboy), a show that itself explores questions of personal and medical ethics in every episode. Through the weekly travails of Hugh Laurie’s misanthropic, pill-popping genius, we are presented with fascinating explorations of zen, existentialism, utilitarianism and the doctor as Nietzchean übermensch, among others. Because the point of the book series is accessibility, the essays are plain-spoken but not dumbed down, and the fun the authors are having being scholastically naughty is palpable. Whether you peruse this particular volume or any of the others, you will find yourself smarter at the end, whether you wanted to be or not.

John G. Nettles