Alain de Botton's Reading List

"Because she is a very admirable essayist. For me, her essays are better than her novels, which I never got along with. What I particularly like are her essays of description. In “Street Haunting”, she makes a very ordinary subject, such as going for a walk around London, very charming. When you put it down the world seems a more interesting place. Not so much. Woolf was like many writers of the early 20th century, such as Joyce or Proust , who were interested in the word “modern” – a word today which we overuse. The traditions of the 19th century had been broken and the modern world was going to be governed by new things, particularly by technology. And it was going to be a predominantly urban, democratic world, dominated by the media. A writer like Woolf was both excited and worried by this. The title for me captures some of those feelings. I think to describe it as such would not be accurate. She never discusses the position or rights of women in these essays. She wrote particularly feminist essays in other books, but not in this one."

"He was one of the most accomplished interpreters of Freud in England. And what is interesting is that he makes psychoanalysis very English, if you like. He takes a body of knowledge that can be very abstract and pretentious at times, and turns it into something much more suited to the English character. By that I mean that he spoke in plain language. He was also eccentric and he had a sense of humour, which we associate with literature in this country. He was also humane. He worked with children and their mothers and fathers, and he was very aware that life is difficult – and that we are all slightly crazy. Rather than humiliating us and making us feel that certain thoughts are perverted, as some psychoanalysts did, he was generous about it. Winnicott also came up with the idea of the “good enough mother”. Other psychoanalysts often demanded that the mother be everything, or else the child would be harmed. But Winnicott allowed a greater amount of error for both the mother and father. For anyone who has a family of their own it’s a nice deprecatory starting point. Definitely. A lot of his writing involved picking up the broken pieces after the Second World War, when children had endured complicated family arrangements – whether the father was away, or killed, or the children sent to the countryside. He found a ready audience in his ideas about imperfection, and about accepting imperfection while still trying to get better. When I think about the essayists that I like, I realise I have a very low tolerance for complicated writing. There is almost nothing in the humanities that can’t be expressed simply, even if it’s a complicated idea. It’s not rocket science, so the onus is on the writer to provide a charming reading experience. Partly for literary reasons – I like the way he writes and I like his personality. He is the sort of person I would like to be friends with, which I don’t feel about either Anna or Sigmund Freud. While a lot of what he says is Freudian, I prefer the nuances and the ordinariness that he holds on to while discussing pretty weird stuff."

"I think I can correct both analyses. Though Schopenhauer comes out with some pretty extreme comments, he never loses his sense of humour and a lot of what he says has a slightly tongue-in-cheek quality. He delights in provoking us and I think it’s wrong to say that he is entirely grim-faced. And as for myself – I feel very close to his personality. The Germans call it galgenhumor – which is a kind of gallows humour, which both he and I share. I have an unfortunate reputation for being a cheerful chap peddling happy thoughts. He was the first to do so and, you’re right, that’s something fascinating about him – that he took Buddhism seriously and integrated it into his philosophy. Anyone past the age of 20 is sure to realise that our desires are pretty endless and that some of them are the result of a modern capitalist society. It’s very nice to be reminded by Schopenhauer that we won’t ever get to a stable position where our longings will end. But whereas some Buddhist texts are unappealing and quite strange, what Schopenhauer does is to write about Buddhism for the Western mind. I don’t think I’d read him when I wrote it. But I think that Schopenhauer was a proto-Darwinist in that he suggested that the reason we fall in love is just to have children, that it’s a biological imperative and we can’t expect much happiness from it. No one can live with that – though it’s a very interesting provocation, it’s not something to absolutely believe in. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."

"I admit I know the author very well. I partly chose it because it reflects many ideas that I have discussed with him and I also think he writes very well. His central argument is that beauty is linked with all kinds of values that we find encoded in objects, and that these values can excite and move us just as people can excite and move us. I had not heard discussions of beauty unfolding in this way. The modern way of thinking about beauty is to consider it a diversion. People apologise for finding someone attractive because we think it’s superficial. Or if someone is interested in fashion, they’ll say: “I know it’s all a bit frivolous.” Armstrong goes back to a much earlier view held by Greek philosophers, which was that our connection to beauty is connected to deep things and it’s an interest in goodness more generally. It’s a good starting point for being a decent human being and that is not at all a modern day version of beauty."

"It is a series of essays on the places he’s visited. It’s not one journey but a scattering of essays. He is a counter-cultural hippy figure and that comes across in his book – there’s a chapter on taking dope in Amsterdam. He is also horny and has a lot of sex. He is not an older gentleman just travelling around – he is a hipster, a dude. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I guess because it’s not a travel book in that sense. It’s a book about his mind, which I think is both interesting and funny. And he is charming as a writer. He is constantly flitting with ideas about all sorts of stuff – not big ideas, but things such as how easy it is to lose your hotel room key and why grass is green (literally). There is lots of stuff in it, hung together by the force of his personality. You would have a hard time describing it to a publisher. In this age where books are supposed to be about one thing, whether it’s Henry VIII or the Crimean War, it’s a very nice change. The title is supposed to be in praise of slacker-dom and not doing very much. It’s not about yoga at all."

"I’m reading “Zona,” the latest book by one of my favorite contemporary writers, Geoff Dyer. The premise of the book sounds immensely boring — an essay on Andrei Tarkovsky’s fim “Stalker” — but fortunately, like most of Dyer’s works, it isn’t about anything other than the author."

"I remain predictably in thrall to Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” There is so much in the novel, it’s possible for two committed Proustians to love it for entirely different reasons."

"I remain predictably in thrall to Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” There is so much in the novel, it’s possible for two committed Proustians to love it for entirely different reasons."

"I have been consoled by Arthur Schopenhauer’s delightfully morbid pessimism in “The Wisdom of Life.” “We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness,” he tells us."

"It wasn’t till early adolescence that I saw the point of books and then it was the old stalwart, “The Catcher in the Rye,” that got me going."

"His essay on photography, “Camera Lucida,” is a model of what a highly rigorous but personal essay should be like."

"I couldn’t have written my first book, “On Love,” without reading his “A Lover’s Discourse.” Barthes taught me courage and innovation at the level of form."

"I’m always close to tears reading Judith Kerr’s delightful children’s story, “The Tiger Who Came to Tea.” It tells of a tiger who turns up, quite unexpectedly, at teatime at the house of a girl called Sophie and her mother."

"I’ve been reading a nonfiction cartoon called “Couch Fiction,” by a British psychoanalyst, Phillippa Perry. The book is simply the best single volume on analysis I’ve ever read."

"I got very angry about the food industry reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s excellent “Eating Animals.”"

"Goethe’s “Sorrows of Young Werther” is like a distillation of all the themes of the Western approach to love. It’s also a study in immaturity."

"Le Corbusier is an outstanding writer. His style is utterly clear, brusque, funny and polemical in the best way. I recommend “Towards a New Architecture.”"

"His largely forgotten book, “Of a Fire on the Moon,” fascinates me: a big sprawling essay on technology and America that deserves a wider audience."

"I’d give them Theodore Zeldin’s “Intimate History of Humanity,” a beautiful attempt to connect up the large themes of history with the needs of the individual soul."

"I’d point them to Ernst Gombrich’s “Art and Illusion,” which opens up the visual arts and psychology."

"I’d especially give them a sad, poignant, questing little book called “The Unquiet Grave” by Cyril Connolly (written under the alias Palinurus)."

"I’d love to read Chris Ware’s new book, “Building Stories,” which was unfortunately out of stock (an extraordinary oversight) and has just become available again."

"Roland Barthes spent much of his career writing about the most ordinary things: washing powder, the Eiffel Tower, falling in love, short- and long-hemmed skirts, photographs of his mother. And yet he brought a classical education and a philosophical mind to bear on these subjects. He knew how to connect Racine and beach holidays, Freud and the anticipation of a lover’s phone call. His work rejected the division between the high and the low, like so many modern artists (Joyce and Beckett, Duch..."