How to Think More About Sex by Alain de Botton

(Picador, $16)

This sounds like a book none of us needs, said Hadley Freeman in The Guardian (U.K.). “For those who believe that philosophy is, by and large, little more than stating the obvious with extra jazz hands,” nothing that the brainy writer Alain de Botton says about the subject of sex will alter your worldview in the least. But the author of How Proust Can Change Your Life isn’t attempting anything so mundane as to teach his readers how to have better sex, said Maggie Fazeli Fard in The Washington Post. He instead wants us to be more at ease when contemplating the subject—to feel, as he writes, “a little less painfully strange” when we think or talk about that essential, primal activity.

“I’ve long had a love-hate relationship with De Botton’s prose,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. I admire his precision, but “shudder at his preciousness.” Still, this 185-page book is lucid and provocative, full of sharp aphorisms and intriguing thought experiments. When one spouse cheats on the other, he says, the betrayed easily could apologize first—“for being themselves,” for “being human.” He recommends new wedding vows that include the words “I promise to be disappointed by you and you alone.” Sex, he reminds us, “will never be simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be.” As “damnably cute” as its deckle-edged pages may be, this is “an honest book that’s on the prowl for honest insight.”

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Sex researchers might object, said Tracy Clark-Flory in Salon.com. They, after all, spend their careers seeking empirical evidence to support the kind of grand assertions that De Botton treats as an artist’s right. “Then again, some truths are better told in philosophical pronouncements than in pie charts.” Here’s one: “Deep inside, we never quite forget the needs with which we were born: to be accepted as we are, without regard to our deeds; to be loved through the medium of our body; to be enclosed in another’s arms.” That’s not science. But it is a nugget of useful wisdom—the kind “worthy of only the most refined of refrigerator doors.”