Alain de Botton / Books / Untitled Books

Summer reading from the author of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work...

Alain de Botton

What's currently on your bedside table?

I'm much enjoying John Armstrong's new book, In Search of Civilization, which asks what this big and neglected word, civilization, could still mean in the modern world (which has come to think of it as a byword for something dead or threatening).

What would you recommend this summer?

I think a great summer novel is Marcel Proust's Withing a Budding Grove (appalling title). It's the record of the narrator's stay at a Normandy seaside holiday resort - and more specifically, his love affair with a beautiful, pouting, tricky, mesmerising teenager called Albertine. It's full of moments of recognition for anyone who has ever been on a beach holiday. He covers what it feels like to arrive in a new hotel, how the other guests size each other up, how beautiful adolescent girls can look as they play tennis on the beach, how annoying they can be when they giggle as a gang, the almost green colour of the sea on an overcast day, the smell of a towel left out to warm in the sun, the moisture in the air as you go inland from the beach a little and so on and so forth. People often assume that you have to read the whole of Proust's big novel - and therefore read none of it. My suggestion is to pick up this book, which is volume II in the series, and forget about ever reading the whole entity, this is enough.

What are you taking on holiday?

I'll be taking a book by David Pascoe called Airspaces - a cultural history of the airport. Nothing better for whiling away the hours at Luton.

Monday, 3 August, 2009