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How Proust Can Change Your Life
- Narrated by: Nicholas Bell
- Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins
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Publisher's summary
For anyone who ever wondered what Marcel Proust had in mind when he wrote the one-and-a-quarter-million words of In Search of Lost Time (while bedridden no less), Alain de Botton has the answer. For, in this stylish, erudite and frequently hilarious book, de Botton dips deeply into Proust’s life and work - his fiction, letters, and conversations – and distils from them that rare self-help manual: one that is actually helpful.
Here, tendered in prose almost as luminous as its subject’s, is advice on cultivating friendships, suffering successfully, recognising love, and understanding why you should never sleep with someone on the first date. And here, too, is a generously perceptive literary biography that suggests that the master is as relevant today as he was in fin de siècle Paris.
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- By: Sally Cline
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Zelda Fitzgerald was the mythical American Dream Girl of the Roaring Twenties who became, in the words of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, "the first American flapper." Their romance transformed a symbol of glamour and spectacle of the Jazz Age. When Zelda cracked up, not long after the stock market crash of 1929, Scott remained loyal to her through a nightmare of later breakdowns and final madness.
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The Beautiful and the Bungled
- By Silverthorne on 12-08-17
By: Sally Cline
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How Fiction Works
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- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
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Ranging widely from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings, Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. He sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision, resulting in nothing less than a philosophy of the novel, which has won critical acclaim nationwide, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times Book Review.
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Educational!
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Romantic Outlaws
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- By: Charlotte Gordon
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Charlotte Gordon's new work is a fresh look at the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, who together comprise one of the most illustrious and inspiring mother-daughter pairs in history.
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Tons of info, poor format choice.
- By Gotta Tellya on 02-06-17
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At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
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Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
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Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know
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Elegant, profound, and riveting, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know illuminates not only the complex relationships between three of the greatest writers in the English language and their fathers, but also illustrates the surprising ways these men surface in their work. Through these stories of fathers and sons, Tóibín recounts the resistance to English cultural domination, the birth of modern Irish cultural identity, and the extraordinary contributions of these complex and masterful authors.
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Eminently re-readable
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Labyrinths
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Clever and ambitious, Emma Jung yearned to study the natural sciences at the University of Zurich. But the strict rules of proper Swiss society at the beginning of the 20th century dictated that a woman of Emma's stature - one of the richest heiresses in Switzerland - travel to Paris to "finish" her education, to prepare for marriage to a suitable man. Engaged to the son of one of her father's wealthy business colleagues, Emma's conventional and predictable life was upended when she met Carl Jung.
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Carl plays center stage
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Uncle Vanya
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Adapted by David Mamet from a translation by Vlada Chernornirdik. In this classic of Chekhov’s canon, an overbearing professor pays a visit to his country estate, where Sonya and Vanya, his daughter and former brother-in-law, have slaved to maintain his wealth. But Vanya is enchanted by the professor’s new wife, while Sonya has fallen for the town’s melancholy doctor. Includes a conversation with Rosamund Bartlett, author of Chekhov: Scenes from a Life.
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Poor American soap
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The Fellowship
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C. S. Lewis is the 20th century's most widely read Christian writer and J. R. R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met weekly in Lewis' Oxford rooms and a nearby pub. They read aloud from works in progress, argued about anything that caught their fancy, and gave one another invaluable companionship, inspiration, and criticism.
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If You Love Literature...
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What Matters in Jane Austen
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- Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
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In What Matters in Jane Austen?, John Mullan shows that we can best appreciate Austen's brilliance by looking at the intriguing quirks and intricacies of her fiction. Asking and answering some very specific questions about what goes on in her novels, he reveals the inner workings of their greatness. In 20 short chapters, each of which explores a question prompted by Austen’s novels, Mullan illuminates the themes that matter most in her beloved fiction.
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Intriguing details and background
- By Barbara JA on 11-12-13
By: John Mullan
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Changed me a lot as a father
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We probably went to school for what felt like a very long time. We probably took care with our homework. Along the way we surely learned intriguing things about equations, the erosion of glaciers, the history of the Middle Ages, and the tenses of foreign languages. But why, despite all the lessons we sat through, were we never taught the really important things that dominate and trouble our lives: who to start a relationship with, how to trust people, how to understand one’s psyche, how to move on from sorrow or betrayal, and how to cope with anxiety and shame?
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Wonderful
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What listeners say about How Proust Can Change Your Life
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Robert F. Jones
- 04-19-17
Personal
Any additional comments?
Taste of what Proust might be about - focusing on major areas like friends, love, books. Elaborates on how beauty is found in noticing things that might otherwise be considered mundane. It is only through pain and difficult lessons that we really learn. Avoiding the common turn of phrase to really describe what is experienced rather than relying on someone else's perception. Richness in the minutia. Descriptions of Proust as a tortured individual.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Link
- 05-16-21
Incredibly Excellent.
It's incredibly-intelligent, insightfully-brash vulnerable and overwhelming beautiful. A brilliant “read” as I also own the hardcopy and a marvelous audio rendition. If you’ve got 1 credit and 1 wish left - do make the right choice.
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- Anonymous User
- 03-15-21
The Brilliance Of Alain de Botton
Alain unpacks Proust With Precision & Mastery. He has sage like ability to simplify the complex. He is truly the premier PHILOSOPHER of contemporary times.
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- Jeanne Nix
- 10-09-13
Elitists can be humorous
Any additional comments?
I have tried unsuccessfully several times to read "Remembrance of Things Past." It's on my list of books to tackle....again. Knowing that Virginia Woolf was (apparently) totally taken with this book (at least for a period of time) helps....but then, one would have to know who Virginia Woolf is/was. So, therein, in my mind, lies the problem. The author makes some really interesting connections between Proust, his novels and real life. Some are "tres amusant." I learned a lot about Proust's life. Like many geniuses, he was outside the range of "normal" (however one defines that). Notwithstanding, there are many allusions and references to people, places and things that many folks would not know (trust me; I'm not assuming. I teach high school...people don't know a lot). So, it's funny, but you have to have a really, really, really good liberal arts education (a bad word these days0 to get it.
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- Darwin8u
- 02-20-13
A nice petite primer on Proust
A nice petite primer on Proust. It travels similar ground as Bakewell's How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, Bryson's Shakespeare: The World as Stage, and even Wright's The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are. These books are not quite biography, not quite self help, but books that use the respective author's life/work/time as a peep stone into our own world.
Don't be distracted by De Botton's hyperbolic title. Neither he nor Proust is claiming any special power to change your life, but what they are trying to do is simply write something that will be read, perhaps appreciated. In the end they might even hope to deliver something that will be give their readers hints of how to live, how to love, how to suffer, and how to slow down and SEE the world.
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41 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 12-26-22
utterly lovely
a great piece on a great lover of beauty. I highly recommend giving it a go
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- Lexy
- 08-23-22
Proust explained
After trying to get through Swann’s Way and failing, I decided to give this audiobook a try. I have watched interviews with Alain de Boton and read two of his other books and have enjoyed how he clearly, and with obvious enjoyment, provides enticing ways of seeing the relevance of classical studies to our everyday lives.
The narrator of this audiobook manages to carry that same attitude of happy discussion, rather than pedantic lecture, that the author has displayed in his writing and filmed interviews. Such a pleasure to listen. I am now going to attempt, yet again, to read Proust’s works, this time with a bit more patience and appreciation. Thank you!
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- jrc
- 04-17-15
a lesson on how to appreciate your life.
this book was no struggle, and demonstrates reading proust attainable and worh the trouble.
thanks
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- Ramon
- 12-16-22
De Botton delivers, as ever
As John Berger would say, "a way of seeing" that's differently perceptive and alters one's approach to Proust, literature in general and the world around one.
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- Earnest
- 12-15-13
Gentle, inciting and above all, human.
What made the experience of listening to How Proust Can Change Your Life the most enjoyable?
Being aware of de Botton's accessible, yet insightful previous work, helped me enjoy his specific overview of a lengthy series of books I know I will never read or listen to. Knowing that this slim novel is as close as I will ever get to knowing a fraction of what Proust tried to incite his readers to think AFTER they put his books down helped me cope with my awe and wonder. Mostly I loved chuckling along with the whimsical self doubts revealed by the diverse reactions to Proust's monumental achievements by people involved with Monty Python, Virginia Woolf and of course the author himself. Being a fan already of the previous incitements to think further than the parameters of the aforementioned, I could trust this mini guide.
Who was your favorite character and why?
Although this is not quite appropriate for this book, being a Proustian Primer, it helps me to mention the author himself as a "character." His " presence" as he drives through the French countryside near Chartres on the way to find the fabled Proustian Madeleine, I was reminded of we the countless tourists who have travelled the globe, retracing/ revisiting/paying homage to Art and places which have figured previously only as figments of someone else's imagination. Proust himself would have approved, I think, because we are prompted to avoid "artistic idolatry" and relish the every day items we encounter, in the Proustian spirit.
What three words best describe Nicholas Bell’s voice?
Disappointing French accent. I am sorry. Previous reviewers have remarked on the gross mis pronunciation of the names, places, events which form the important foundations of this book. They were correct of course. What a mistake to make by the production company. Although the gentleman's voice itself is pleasant enough, the awful accent jars in nearly every line.
If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?
Not a pilgrimage to points of Proustian artistic interest.
Any additional comments?
How life affirming a gentle book can be. There is no " self help" tone to this book for which some of us are really grateful. Nonetheless, the wisdom of others can be mulled over with no entreaties that this, or any other knowledge is " the key."
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