A review by arnizach
How to Think More About Sex by Alain de Botton

3.0

This was an overall fun read, but still something of a mixed bag. Maybe because it's such a short book and de Botton doesn't have space to develop his arguments more than a little bit. So perhaps the points raised that I found disagreeable would less so if developed more fully. That said, I found the book overall to justify the short time I spent reading it on account of the good points raised. Some were even profound. I enjoyed his treatment of beauty, pornography, desire and, especially, impotence (best line by far in the book: "Impotence is an achievement of the ethical imagination.") De Botton writes reasonably well in a easy going and slightly humorous style. I got a bit tired of the imagined sexual scenarios interspersed throughout, but I get why he put them in. I like the way the book was set up, with short sections marked numerically. I can imagine it working well in a group discussion - which is what they do at School of Life, right? If you're looking for some philosophical musing on sex, you could probably do a lot worse than this book.