Sophie's World (a word I can't type for some reason, unless I mean to type "word," so please let me know if there are any mistakes I didn't catch) was originally written in Norwegian, and it made me wonder how many other great books are out there that we in America just don't have access to because they aren't translated into English. All the more reason to become multilingual!
Sophie Amundsen is a very normal 14-year-old Norwegian girl. She lives with her mom (her father is almost always away at sea) and has a best friend named Joanna. But then one day, a mysterious envelope shows up in her mailbox, and inside is a slip of paper that says Who are you? on it. Not an hour later, a second letter arrives--Where does the world come from? Sophie's stumped, but there's more in store for her. A large brown envelope arrives later that day with the beginning of a course on philosophy. The anonymous correspondence continues, and Sophie quickly learns more about who her teacher is, but there are more mysteries than that. The personal belongings of a girl named Hilde--who shares Sophie's birthday--keep turning up in her world, as well as postcards to Hilde from the enigmatic girl's father, a UN major in Lebanon. And at the same time, Sophie and her philosophy teacher begin to discover that their world may be nothing like what they've always thought it to be.