By the Book (25 page)

Alain de Botton

What book is on your night stand now?

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 film
Stalker
—but fortunately, like most of Dyer's works, it isn't about anything other than the author: his obsessions, his fears, his encroaching (and always endearing) feelings of insanity. The book is held together by the sheer quality of the author's voice, a feat in itself.

What was the last truly great book you read?

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. Some like the dinner parties, some the art history, some the jealousy, some the young girls in bloom. The Proust I respond to is the psychological essayist who observes the motives and emotions of his characters with some of the forensic acuity (and dry deadly wit) of the great French moralists like Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, and Stendhal; the Proust who writes things like: “There is no doubt that a person's charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: ‘No, this evening I shan't be free.'”

What is your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

I'm devoted to the essay. This is a much less defined genre than, say, the history book or the novel. The kind of essays I have in mind come down in a line from Montaigne, and tackle large quasi-philosophical themes in a tone that is warm, human, digressive, and touching. You feel like you have come to know a friend, not just a theme. I have loved essays by, among others, Emerson, Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Donald Winnicott, Cyril Connolly, Joseph Brodsky, Lawrence Weschler, Milan Kundera, Julian Barnes, Adam Gopnik, and Nicholson Baker.

Have you read any good books on philosophy lately?

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 may be said of it: ‘It is bad today and every day it will get worse, until the worst of all happens.'” It's a mistaken prejudice of our times to think that the only way to cheer someone up is to tell them something cheerful. Exaggerated tragic pronouncements work far better.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? The prime minister?

Your president is a complex case, a man of passion, courage, and oratory. And also, a diligent, prickly, practical law professor. I've got a weakness for the former side, so would want to put books in front of him that could bolster what I think of as his best impulses. I'd particularly keep him close to Whitman and Thoreau, those great American voices of openhearted humanity, daring, and liberty. As for the British prime minister, he urgently needs to read John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, and read up on constitutional matters from a historical perspective.

What were your favorite books as a child? Did you have a favorite character or hero?

I was a very unliterary child, which might reassure parents with kids who don't read. Lego was my thing, as well as practical books like
See Inside a Nuclear Power Station
. 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. By sixteen, I was lost—often in the philosophy aisles, in a moody and melodramatic state. I was impressed by Kierkegaard's claim that he was going to read only “writings by men who have been executed.”

What books had the greatest influence on you when you were a student?

The French essayist Roland Barthes was, and in many ways continues to be, my greatest influence. I responded to his way of approaching very large topics (love, the meaning of literature, photography) in oblique ways, with great formal innovation and originality. 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.

What was the last book that made you cry?

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. You'd expect them to panic, but they take the appearance of this visitor entirely in their stride—and their reaction is a subtle invitation for us to approach life's unexpected challenges with resilience and good humor.

The last book that made you laugh?

I've been reading a nonfiction cartoon called
Couch Fiction
, by a British psychoanalyst, Philippa Perry. The book is simply the best single volume on analysis I've ever read, and takes us through one man's analysis and his attempts to resolve a range of problems with his mother and his girlfriend. It's done with images and speech bubbles by Junko Graat; it's constantly charming and always deeply accurate and thought provoking.

The last book that made you furious?

I got very angry about the food industry reading Jonathan Safran Foer's excellent
Eating Animals
. Now, a few years later, I'm bewildered and deeply worried by the way one can be impressed and moved by a book and yet do absolutely nothing about one's indignation and simply put all the good arguments to one's side—frightening evidence of the impotence of books in the hands of fickle readers.

What's the best love story you've ever read?

Goethe's
The 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. Werther's love for Charlotte depends on not being reciprocated. Had she said yes, his love might have foundered in the routines of child care. In other words, it's a love story that subtly points out how much the standard love story doesn't prepare us for what mature relationships are like. It's a book that should be given to the young, with warning.

Are there any architects that you think are also particularly good writers? What are your favorite books on architecture?

Le Corbusier is an outstanding writer. His ideas achieved their impact in large measure because he could write so convincingly. His style is utterly clear, brusque, funny, and polemical in the best way. His books are beautifully laid out with captions and images. I recommend
Towards a New Architecture
. It's a deep pity that while Le Corbusier's style has been much copied by architects, very few have drawn the right lessons from him about literature and prose style.

If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?

I would have liked to meet John Ruskin, who has been a big influence on me, and whose eccentric visions of the ideal society (at the level of architecture and morality) I am constantly inspired by. He felt sad, persecuted, lonely, and misunderstood. I would have wanted to try to be his friend.

And if you could meet a character from literature, who would it be?

Proust's Albertine sounds high maintenance but rewarding—and, in my eyes, a proper woman, a tomboy, rather than a hermaphrodite.

Who are your favorite writers of all time? And among your contemporaries?

My life has been variously overtaken (and ruined by) Montaigne, Stendhal, Freud, and W. H. Auden. I think a lot about W. G. Sebald and Ryszard Kapuscinski. A contemporary of sorts, albeit in a different generation, was Norman Mailer. 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. Among the living, I deeply love: Milan Kundera, Michel Houellebecq, Philip Roth, and Nicholson Baker.

And if you had to give a young person a list of books to be read above all others to prepare for adulthood, what would you include?

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. There's a lot of despair in adolescence, so I'd recommend comfort from pessimists like Pascal and Cioran. I'd especially give them a sad, poignant, questing little book called
The Unquiet Grave
, by Cyril Connolly (written under the alias Palinurus).

What are you planning to read next?

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. In the meantime, I feel I'm going to have a great time with Douglas Coupland's new little book about Marshall McLuhan.

Alain de Botton
is the author of
How Proust Can Change Your Life
,
The Art of Travel
, and
The Consolations of Philosophy
, among other books.

Dave Barry

What was the best book you read last year?

Doris Kearns Goodwin's
Team of Rivals
. I'm probably the last person on the planet to read it; I loved the movie
Lincoln
and wanted more. I am awed by the amount of research that went into that book. Most of my research consists of brief Google forays in search of factoids that I can distort beyond recognition.

When and where do you like to read?

I like to read at the beach, but the beach always turns out to be too relaxing, and I fall asleep after two pages. So I wind up doing most of my actual reading at night in bed, where I sometimes get through as many as three pages before I fall asleep.

Who are your favorite authors?

Robert Benchley and P. G. Wodehouse. Also (it goes without saying) Proust.

What's your preferred literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

I like nonfiction, mostly history. My guilty pleasure is tough-guy-loner action novels, like the Jack Reacher series, where the protagonist is an outwardly rugged but inwardly sensitive and thoughtful guy who, through no fault of his own, keeps having to beat the crap out of people.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

The Brothers Karamazov
, by Dostoyevsky. I was required to read this book in English class during my freshman year at Haverford College, but I never finished it. I seriously doubt that Dostoyevsky ever finished it. So I figure if the president read it, he could tell me what happens.

Paper or electronic?

Definitely paper. I say this because we authors get smaller royalties on e-book sales. So I'd like to start a rumor that electronic books cause fatal diseases and sometimes explode. This must be true, because it's printed right here in
The New York Times
.

Who are the funniest writers alive?

Roy Blount Jr., Carl Hiaasen, Steve Martin, Andy Borowitz, Alan Zweibel, Gene Weingarten, and Nora Ephron (she's alive in my heart). Also the
Onion
guys, and the folks who write
South Park
,
Modern Family
,
The Office
,
Parks and Recreation
, and
Portlandia
. Also a surprising number of Internet commenters.

What's the funniest book you've ever read?

I'm not sure I could pick just one.
The Code of the Woosters
is up there. And
A Confederacy of Dunces
almost made me wet my pants on an airplane.