{"id":5357,"count":17,"description":"\u201cEssays root ideas in personal experience\u201d, the philosopher Alain de Botton tells us in his interview<\/a>\u00a0in which he discussed five books of \u201cilluminating essays\u201d.\u00a0 He chooses The Crowded Dance of Modern Life<\/em><\/a> by Virginia Woolf, as well as a selection of DW Winnicott<\/a>, The Wisdom of Life<\/em><\/a> by Arthur Schopenhauer, The Secret Power of Beauty<\/em><\/a> by John Armstrong and Yoga for People Who Can\u2019t be Bothered to Do It<\/em><\/a> by Geoff Dyer, which \u201cis in praise of slacker-dom and not doing very much. It\u2019s not about Yoga at all.\u201d\r\n\r\nDavid Russell, Associate Professor at Oxford University, recommends the best Victorian essays<\/a>, including selections by Charles Lamb<\/a>, Matthew Arnold<\/a>, George Eliot<\/a>, Walter Pater<\/a> and (one twentieth-century writer) Marion Milner<\/a> and discusses the connection between the essay and the development of urban culture in the 19th<\/sup> century.\r\n\r\nDame Hermione Lee, the writer's biographer, chooses her best books on Virginia Woolf<\/a>.\u00a0 She discusses how and why her stature has grown so much since the 1960s and selects a range of her books including diaries and novels, as well as essays, including To the Lighthouse<\/a>, <\/em>which she considers Woolf\u2019s greatest novel, her Diaries<\/em><\/a> and her essay \"Walter Sickert: A Conversation<\/a>\",<\/em> which can be seen as a meditation on the disparities between painting and writing as art forms.\r\n\r\nAdam Gopnik<\/a>, of the New Yorker<\/em>, chooses Woolf\u2019s The Common Reader<\/em><\/a> as well as collections by Max Beerbohm<\/a>, EB White<\/a>, Randall Jarrell<\/a> and Clive James<\/a>.","link":"https:\/\/fivebooks.com\/category\/nonfiction-books\/essays\/","name":"Essays","slug":"essays","taxonomy":"category","parent":45785,"meta":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fivebooks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories\/5357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fivebooks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fivebooks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/taxonomies\/category"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fivebooks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories\/45785"}],"wp:post_type":[{"href":"https:\/\/fivebooks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts?categories=5357"},{"href":"https:\/\/fivebooks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/book?categories=5357"},{"href":"https:\/\/fivebooks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/books_like_this?categories=5357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}