Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Alain de Botton (1)

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton

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“There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness.” I like a book like this sometimes, as it replaces or mimics (even fleetingly) the feeling of reading a long and difficult book. It’s not a reading guide, but more of a mini-biography and dissemination of some of the ideas and events from Marcel Proust’s life and work. I have read the first three volumes in In Search of Lost Time, so while I haven’t read all of it, I am close to the […]

In search of found time: a short introduction to Proust

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton

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How Proust Can Change Your Life is Alain de Botton’s often tongue-in-cheek ‘lifestyle guide’ based on lessons from the life of canonical author Marcel Proust, the author of In Search of Lost Time. Although Proust is a canonical author, I have not yet had the pleasure of reading him, nor was I very familiar with his life and background. De Bouton’s guide is interesting- and somewhat heartening- in illustrating how this great author had an inglorious start, wasn’t very good at getting or keeping a […]

Mixed Bag II

Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones

How it Ends by Rachel Howzell Hall

Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton

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Mapping the Interior – Stephen Graham Jones – 3/5 Stars This short novella by Stephen Graham Jones takes two familiar genres, or sub-genres, and puts them together in a space that is interesting, if limited. For one, we have a haunting. In this novella, a 12 year old boy becomes increasingly aware of some kind of supernatural manifestation in his house. Through guesswork and experience, he determines it must be the ghost of his dead father. This guesswork leads the book into its secondary genre, […]

Helping Us Figure Out Why Buildings Cause Such Visceral Reactions

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Best for: People not that familiar with architecture who are interested in learning about it in a philosophical way. In a nutshell: Author de Botton takes the reader through a lovely journey exploring how the buildings we inhabit can help fill missing pieces in our lives, and impact how we feel. Line that sticks with me: “The buildings we admire are ultimately those which, in a variety of ways, extol values we think worthwhile.” (p 98) Why I chose it: I bought this long ago. […]

Art is an incitement to look at our world through another’s eyes

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While Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life is nearly twenty years old, the first I heard of it was on a 2015 episode of the Tim Ferriss Podcast. If you’re unfamiliar with Ferriss, he is outwardly a life-hacking blogger and podcaster. However, his deeper drive seems to be helping others live an examined life. I like that, so even though I’m not a life-hacky guy I listen to his show. On that 2015 episode, I found Botton to be especially charming, and I was […]



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