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The Course of Love
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Julian Rhind-Tutt
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
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Publisher's summary
"The Course of Love is a return to the form that made Mr. de Botton's name in the mid-1990s….love is the subject best suited to his obsessive aphorizing, and in this novel he again shows off his ability to pin our hopes, methods and insecurities to the page." (The New York Times)
The long-awaited and beguiling second novel from Alain de Botton that tracks the beautifully complicated arc of a romantic partnership, from the internationally best-selling author of How Proust Can Change Your Life. De Botton's essay "Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person" (The New York Times, May 28, 2016), which draws from The Course of Love, was the number-one most emailed article for days.
We all know the headiness and excitement of the early days of love. But what comes after? In Edinburgh a couple, Rabih and Kirsten, fall in love. They get married, they have children—but no long-term relationship is as simple as "happily ever after". The Course of Love is a novel that explores what happens after the birth of love, what it takes to maintain love, and what happens to our original ideals under the pressures of an average existence. You experience, along with Rabih and Kirsten, the first flush of infatuation, the effortlessness of falling into romantic love, and the course of life thereafter. Interwoven with their story and its challenges is an overlay of philosophy - an annotation and a guide to what we are reading.
This is a romantic novel in the true sense, one interested in exploring how love can survive and thrive in the long term. The result is a sensory experience - fictional, philosophical, psychological - that urges us to identify deeply with these characters and to reflect on his and her own experiences in love. Fresh, visceral, and utterly compelling, The Course of Love is a provocative and life-affirming novel for everyone who believes in love.
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- Lydia
- 07-04-16
Amazing, much needed retooling of the expectations and realities of Love
Everyone who is attempting romantic relationships should be required to read this book. I feel that the author has so eloquently articulated the feelings and revelations I have come to understand after decades of relationship experience. Young people would be well served to read this novel before attempting serious romantic connections, as the knowledge and perspective the author provides would seriously circumvent a lot of the angst, frustrations and heart aches common to relationships which are built around a society accepted, standard of irrational, untraceable goals for personal connection and commitment. This book helps outline a healthy, realistic course of a love between two people that serves as a better example than most we are given in the media / story telling available today. This book has changed my life!!!
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17 people found this helpful
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- Trixi Sieger
- 07-09-16
Interesting exploration...
This book really nails the human experience. Worth a read to better understand how we process and how we are effected by life and love.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Darwin8u
- 12-24-19
Love is blindness, I don't want to see...
"Love means admiration for qualities in the lover that promise to correct our weaknesses and imbalances; love is a search for completion."
- Alain de Botton, The Course of Love
An interesting approach to the genre. This could have been an interesting book that explores relationships and love through all the stages, but Botton enjoys approaching things with a bit of novelty. And, for the most part, it works. Instead of breaking sections down by stage/ages, Botton uses two characters and their development/romance/love to serve as a central narrative where he can unbutton the blouse of love. The narrative is broken down into 5 major sections: Romanticism, Ever After, Children, Adultery, Beyond Romanticism. His protagonists Rabih and Kirsten make the journey and Botton hangs around and narrates with frequent philosophical asides.
This format worked for about 200 of the 225 pages. If he tried this for 300, I would probably have rejected his approach as gimmicky. But, again, he landed it. Part of the reason I only gave it 4-stars is I do wish he had accompanied this with at least endnotes for the studies, books, etc., that he references. I completely understand why he didn't include any of that in the text, it was teaching through narrative so he tried to almost remove everything that would get in the way of his instructive story (except for the italicized asides). But still, it would have been better with a bit of meat behind the scenes. I don't need to see the tubas, but I like the idea knowing who is playing the notes behind the curtain.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Kelly&Anna
- 02-23-17
Required reading
This should be given to every pubescent child who begins to think of romantic love. And required to re read every 5 years hence forward. Excellent, engaging and encouraging!!!
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6 people found this helpful
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- philip
- 02-19-17
28 years married and still so much to learn. great
wonderful book that everybody getting married or married should listen to with their significant other
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5 people found this helpful
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- io
- 01-31-17
good at understanding the obstacles in a relations
loved it however the narrator gets too quiet during whispers. if you are driving a noisy truck all day you might miss about a quarter of this book
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3 people found this helpful
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- Kosta Stavreas
- 08-31-18
Wonderful story, spectacular performance
Wonderful story, guaranteed to make your soul wiser and your heart softer. I'm not married, but this story took me 3 decades into the future and showed what love is all about. As the author says, "love is a skill, not an enthusiasm". At times I laughed, drifted off into pensive contemplation, or felt uplifted with a very humble and humananistic sense of hope that in the end, all will be well. Narrator is spectacular, true proof that audiobooks are worth it in every way.
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- Amazon Customer
- 05-04-17
Novel therapy
As a marriage therapist all that De Botton says makes complete sense; however I prefer my theory neat and my novels mixed with romance.
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- Lynn Labe
- 01-19-17
Perspective and Possibly Life- Altering
Disappointment in romance and love is inevitable in marriage. That's de Botton's bottom line, and he makes the case elegantly, cogently and even humorously. I loved this book and will be recommending it to any friends who will listen, married and unmarried. I'll also be reading more by this author, who is truly brilliant. Narration was perfect and somehow the narrator (working with great material) made a serious and sobering realization fun.
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- Matt
- 12-23-16
I adored.
This might be the best and most realistic book on love and relationships I have read. It's as on point as something like the books of Sue Johnson, and it is instructive and informative, but it's a novel! I'm a longtime fan of Alain de Botton and this exceeded my hopes. I very eagerly made time in my busy life to listen to the whole book within 48 hours. While I always prefer books narrated by the author, I found the narrator to be perfectly acceptable.
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Dull, suggestions for better alternatives
- By J. Natael on 08-07-13
By: Alain de Botton
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Essays in Love
- By: Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: James Wilby
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Essays in Love is a stunningly original love story. Taking in Aristotle, Wittgenstein, history, religion and Groucho Marx, Alain de Botton charts the progress of a love affair from the first kiss to argument and reconciliation, from intimacy and tenderness to the onset of anxiety and heartbreak.
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Every relationship you've ever analyzed
- By Maria L. Lantin on 05-07-12
By: Alain de Botton
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How to Think More About Sex
- The School of Life
- By: Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: David Thorpe
- Length: 3 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
We don't think too much about sex; we're merely thinking about it in the wrong way. So asserts Alain de Botton in this rigorous and supremely honest book designed to help us navigate the intimate and exciting—yet often confusing and difficult—experience that is sex. Few of us tend to feel we're entirely normal when it comes to sex, and what we're supposed to be feeling rarely matches up with the reality. This book argues that twenty-first-century sex is ultimately fated to be a balancing act between love and desire, and adventure and commitment.
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How to Think About Sex as Only Sex
- By Richard on 02-26-13
By: Alain de Botton
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How Proust Can Change Your Life
- By: Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: Nicholas Bell
- Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
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, letter, and conversations – and distils from them that rare self-help manual: one that is actually helpful.
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A nice petite primer on Proust
- By Darwin8u on 02-20-13
By: Alain de Botton
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The School of Life
- An Emotional Education
- By: The School of Life
- Narrated by: Alain de Botton, Charlie Anson
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Emotional intelligence affects every aspect of the way we live, from romantic to professional relationships, from our inner resilience to our social success. It is arguably the single most important skill for surviving the twenty-first century. But what does it really mean? One decade ago, Alain de Botton founded The School of Life, an institute dedicated to understanding and improving our emotional intelligence. Now he presents the gathered wisdom of those ten years in a wide-ranging and innovative compendium of emotional intelligence that forms an introduction to The School of Life.
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The school of life needs to be in schools.
- By Angela pope on 02-03-23
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On Confidence
- By: The School of Life, Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: Alain de Botton
- Length: 1 hr and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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We spend vast amounts of time acquiring confidence in narrow technical fields: quadratic equations or bioengineering; economics or pole vaulting. But we overlook the primordial need to acquire a more free-ranging variety of confidence - one that can serve us across a range of tasks: speaking to strangers at parties, asking someone to marry us, suggesting a fellow passenger turn down their music, changing the world. This is a guidebook to confidence, why we lack it and how we can acquire more of it in our lives.
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Poignant and timeless
- By Graceny Jimenez on 08-15-20
By: The School of Life, and others
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The Art of Travel
- By: Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: Nicholas Bell
- Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Aside from love, few actvities seem to promise us as much happiness as going traveling: taking off for somewhere else, somewhere far from home, a place with more interesting weather, customs, and landscapes. But although we are inundated with advice on where to travel, few people seem to talk about why we should go and how we can become more fulfilled by doing so.
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Dull, suggestions for better alternatives
- By J. Natael on 08-07-13
By: Alain de Botton
-
Essays in Love
- By: Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: James Wilby
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Essays in Love is a stunningly original love story. Taking in Aristotle, Wittgenstein, history, religion and Groucho Marx, Alain de Botton charts the progress of a love affair from the first kiss to argument and reconciliation, from intimacy and tenderness to the onset of anxiety and heartbreak.
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Every relationship you've ever analyzed
- By Maria L. Lantin on 05-07-12
By: Alain de Botton
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Religion for Atheists
- A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
- By: Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: Kris Dyer
- Length: 5 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The boring debate between fundamentalist believers and non-believers is finally moved on by Alain de Botton's inspiring new book, which boldly argues that the supernatural claims of religion are of course entirely false - and yet that religions still have important things to teach the secular world.
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Disappointing, Erroneous, Implausible
- By Douglas C. Bates on 11-02-12
By: Alain de Botton
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The Consolations of Philosophy
- By: Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Alain de Botton has performed a stunning feat: He has transformed arcane philosophy into something accessible and entertaining, useful and kind. Drawing on the work of six of the world's most brilliant thinkers, de Botton has arranged a panoply of wisdom to guide us through our most common problems.
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Cheering, empathic, helpful
- By Austin on 11-11-09
By: Alain de Botton
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Status Anxiety
- By: Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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This is a book about an almost universal anxiety that is rarely mentioned: an anxiety about what others think of us, about whether we're judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser. This is a book about status anxiety. Best-selling author Alain de Botton asks, with lucidity and charm, where our worries about status come from and what, if anything, we can do to surmount them.
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False Advertising!
- By Jon on 08-02-07
By: Alain de Botton
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The Architecture of Happiness
- By: Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 4 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
One of the great, but often unmentioned, causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: the kinds of chairs, walls, buildings, and streets that surround us. And yet, a concern for architecture is too often described as frivolous, even self-indulgent. Alain de Botton starts from the idea that where we are heavily influences who we can be, and argues that it is architecture's task to stand as an eloquent reminder of our full potential.
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Many elegant words used for a simple topic.
- By Spirit on 08-15-17
By: Alain de Botton
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Self-Knowledge
- By: The School of Life
- Narrated by: Fiona Buckland
- Length: 1 hr and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Ancient Greece, when the philosopher Socrates was asked to sum up what all philosophical commandments could be reduced to, he replied: "Know yourself". Self-knowledge matters so much because it is only on the basis of an accurate sense of who we are that we can make reliable decisions - particularly around love and work. This book takes us on a journey into our deepest, most elusive selves and arms us with a set of tools to understand our characters properly.
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terrible voice
- By Tina Crosby on 08-27-20
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A Course of Love
- Combined Volume
- By: Mari Perron
- Narrated by: Mari Perron
- Length: 34 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance