How Proust Can Change Your Life

 How Proust Can Change Your Life is not a book about Marcel Proust so much as it is a book about how to live attentively. Alain de Botton does not attempt to summarise In Search of Lost Time—a task he knows would be both impossible and undesirable. Instead, he asks a more humane question: what might Proust be useful for?

This shift—from reverence to relevance—is the book’s quiet genius. De Botton treats Proust not as a literary monument but as a companion: difficult, insightful, occasionally maddening, but ultimately generous. The result is a book that gives readers permission to engage deeply with art without surrendering their own lives to it. It is philosophy in service of living, not endurance.

How Proust Can Change Your Life succeeds because it refuses to confuse difficulty with depth. It honours Proust’s brilliance without demanding reader submission, offering instead a model of intellectual companionship. For memoir writers, reflective travellers, and anyone navigating later-life creativity, the book provides a framework for integrating art, memory, and daily life without monumentality.

It is not a book about escaping into literature. It is a book about returning from literature with clearer eyes.

A Brilliant Life

 

A Brilliant Life is a memoir about love, loss, and survival, centred on Rachelle Unreich’s marriage to her husband, Guy, after his diagnosis with early-onset Alzheimer’s. On the surface, it is a grief memoir. In practice, it is something more commercially potent: a love story written against an inevitable erasure.

In Search of Lost Time

 

In Search of Lost Time is not simply a novel; it is an act of attention. Across seven volumes, Marcel Proust undertakes one of the most ambitious literary experiments ever attempted: to recover time not by chronology, but by sensation.

Rather than moving forward through plot, Proust moves inward. A taste, a sound, a shaft of light — these become portals through which memory resurfaces, reshaping the present. His famous madeleine episode is not about nostalgia, but about revelation: the discovery that the past is never truly lost, only waiting to be re-entered through the senses.

Proust’s great insight is that love, travel, and identity are acts of imagination before they are lived realities. Love is revealed as illusion as much as intimacy; desire is shaped as much by fantasy as by presence. Travel, too, is reframed — not as movement through geography, but as movement through perception. We do not discover places, Proust suggests; we discover ourselves within them.

The prose is demanding, deliberately so. Sentences unfold slowly, often mirroring the way thought itself drifts and circles before arriving at clarity. Yet for readers willing to surrender to its rhythm, the reward is profound: a heightened awareness of how meaning forms beneath everyday experience.

For memoir writers, In Search of Lost Time is foundational. It teaches that truth does not reside in events alone, but in how those events are remembered, imagined, and transformed. Time, in Proust’s hands, is not linear — it is elastic, emotional, and endlessly revisitable.

This is not a book to rush. It is a book to inhabit.

The Craftsman

The Craftsman is an exploration of why making things matters — not just to experts, but to everyone. Richard Sennett argues that craftsmanship is simply “the desire to do a job well for its own sake.” Whether you’re building a violin, cooking a meal, coding software, or writing a memoir, the same principles apply: patience, care, practice, and curiosity.

Sennett shows how creativity grows through hands-on work, repetition, and the quiet satisfaction of improving something over time. He reminds us that skill isn’t born from talent alone — it develops through attention and staying with a task long enough to understand it from the inside.

The book’s message is that craftsmanship is both practical and moral. Good work connects us to others, builds trust, and leaves something meaningful behind. In a world obsessed with speed, Sennett invites us to slow down and rediscover the deeper pleasure of making things well.

It’s a thought-provoking read for anyone who wants to live — and create — with more intention.

The History of Ballarat

 

William Bramwell Withers (1823–1913) was a journalist, historian, and long-time Ballarat resident who became one of the first chroniclers of Victoria’s gold rush. His book, The History of Ballarat, From the First Pastoral Settlement to the Present Time, was first serialized in the Ballarat Star in 1870 and later expanded into book form, with a revised edition published in 1887. The work remains a foundational text for understanding Ballarat’s transformation from pastoral outpost to thriving gold city. Withers’ research is built from first-hand interviews, local records, and personal recollections of pioneers. The result is both a historical record and a living portrait of the gold era as it was remembered by those who shaped it.

The book traces Ballarat’s evolution from its early European settlement through to the explosive discovery of gold in 1851, the social upheavals that followed, and the city’s eventual growth into a symbol of Victorian prosperity. Withers combines documented fact with local oral history, giving the reader a vivid sense of what life was like in Ballarat’s formative decades. His writing reflects the style of the 19th century—richly descriptive, moral in tone, and unapologetically focused on the settler experience.

The Creative Act: A Way of Being

Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being (2023) is less of a prescriptive “how-to” manual and more a philosophical meditation on what creativity means, how it works, and how we can live more creative lives. Rubin draws from decades of work producing music across very different genres, and mixes in ideas from mindfulness, presence, and observation. Key ideas:

• Everyone is creative; creativity isn’t a gift reserved only for “artists” or special talent.  
• Creativity is a way of being, not just an act; it involves how we perceive, how present we are, how we allow experience to flow into our work.  
• The role of presence, attention, sensitivity: paying more attention to what draws us, to subtle feeling tones, small everyday details, as opposed to just ideation or output.  
• Working with fear, resistance, imperfection—the idea that part of being creative is moving through self-doubt, messing around, making early drafts, embracing failure.  
• The importance of constraints (limits, boundaries) to focus creativity.  

The Fatal Shore

Robert Hughes ‘The Fatal Shore’ remains the definitive account of Australia’s convict beginnings. With prose as vivid as any novel, Hughes recreates the epic voyages of the First Fleet and the brutal realities of transportation. His gift lies in bringing ships, landscapes, and lives to life, weaving political history with personal voices from journals and letters. While some critics note its romanticism and limited Indigenous perspective, it remains unmatched for readability and atmosphere. For anyone interested in how exile by sea shaped a nation, The Fatal Shore is essential—a history that feels as immediate as story.