The Romantic Movement by Alain de Botton

Not long after I moved to Northern California, I discovered Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park. Besides just being a darned good bookstore, my favorite thing about Kepler’s was that along the shelves, staff members had inserted small slips of paper, “shelf-talkers,” that highlighted favorites and special items. I liked to walk along the fiction shelves and read the tags.

It was here that I discovered Alain de Botton. De Botton is rightly celebrated for his philosophical musings on subjects ranging from travel to Proust to love, but the book I found was not among his more well-known titles. Not that it made any difference to me—I had never heard of him. I noticed this book because it was marked with a “sale” tag, a hardcover for only $3.98. How could one resist a markdown of this scale for a book entitled, The Romantic Movement: Sex, Shopping and the Novel?

After reading only a few pages, I knew that de Botton was a writer that I would come to love. Through an average heroine in an average love affair, de Botton deftly and wittily captured the essence of the biggest subject in literature using charts, graphs, and pseudo-scientific pontification. It was simultaneously hilarious and spot-on. It was the first time I felt like an author was truly able to describe and explain our stupid human foibles in love affairs. Or maybe he was just able to explain mine.

The Romantic Movement was written shortly after de Botton’s more well-known book, On Love. While the two are similar in scope, I have always had a slightly fonder spot in my heart for The Romantic Movement. I think it does a better job at explaining how we average people do this falling-in-love thing, and, more importantly, I bought it our beloved Kepler’s. For four dollars.

The Romantic Movement by Alain de Botton

tags: books book reviews relationships love Alain de Botton