Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

...about Alain de Botton this year, here's a bit more: Bookslut has an interview with him this month. And I don't think I followed up after finishing his new book The Architecture of Happiness. Yes, it's about the promise and failings of architecture, but it's more about how we are drawn to beautiful spaces (and beautiful objects of all kinds) because they promise happiness and contentment. He has a wonderful sympathy for inanimate objects and what they bring to our lives. This book of his is, in fact, another philosophy book about how to recognize one's own feelings about things, how to figure it all out. Much of the book is made up of his gentle observations about our lives:

"Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored." (p.157)

"It is books, poems and paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge." (p.262)

He could write a book about pencils (oh, wait, it's already been done...) and I would shut all the doors, pull the shades down, unplug the phone, turn on my reading lamp, and read it straight through. He speaks my language when he talks about what's important in life: beauty, generosity, modesty, comfort, melancholy, tenderness. As if that's not enough about him, he was on Talk of the Nation in October (for half an hour), and All Things Considered a few weeks ago (five minutes). And I keep hearing that his new three-part series will be on PBS sometime soon, but I can't find any listings for it yet. One more quote from the book, to finish:

"As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us." (p.123)