I love reading de Botton's work. He takes the tired genre of the love story and turns it into something quirky, fun, and, most of all, right on the nose. This is what love stories are like in real life! And his pseudo-scientific approach to something as unscientific as love is hilarious.

From Kirkus Reviews:
A tour-de-force pleasure of a first novel that takes a conventional love story and textures it with philosophical ruminations, ironic subtitles, and various sorts of playfulness, including pencil drawings. The narrator, on a flight from Paris to London, meets Chloe in the first chapter, "Romantic Fatalism: The longing for a destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life." In each ironically titled chapter to follow ("Marxism," "Beauty, Skepticism and Faith," etc.), the paragraphs are numbered, as de Botton develops his disquisition upon love and its limitations. ...A dissertation/novel on romantic narcissism that's both intellectually stimulating and emotionally touching.

Would like to see this travel as a bookring...

updated 9/20/04

Here is the mailing order for this bookring. Please refer back to this list when you are ready to mail, just in case the order has changed. Thanks, and have fun!

Atenea-Nike (Spain)
LizzieM (Scotland)
bookmaniac70 (Bulgaria)
eloisamos (Brazil)
deadsteen (NY)
Ilios (FL)

tnkbl (home)

This book is on its way today! First stop: Atenea-Nike!

Just got it! I'll start it tomorrow or the day after, when I finish the book I'm currently reading. As I mentioned when I signed for this bookring, I had just read an article by the same author, emailed to me by a good friend when I saw the book's ring announced, and I thought "this must be karma - you have to read that book!"

I'm sorry it took me so long to journal this book when in fact I read it in three days or so. Alas, I've been rather unonlinenish these weeks, and a bit busy... my excuses to all the ring members.
Anyway, the book is absolutely delicious, full of insight and somewhat satirical, yet it's tempered by an infinite ... piety, I would say, for our weaknesses and stupidities when in love.