Does reading make you a better person? Will fiction improve your empathy? Can great literature fix your relationship? The publishing industry seems to think so: literary appreciation as self-help is one of its most irritating recent trends. Pioneered by Alain de Botton, the genre—a first cousin to the biblio-autobigraphy, but with Buzzfeed-worthy titles—has a new, and unlikely, entry: How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, a conservative economist’s attempt to show how the father of capitalism offers a guide to happiness. Here’s a brief and incomplete guide to the lit crit life coach genre.
![](0dd906348d3ed0129980c2604843f74a1cfed434.jpeg?w=400&h=605)
How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life by Russ Roberts
Sample Advice: “When we earn the admiration of others honestly by being respectable, honorable, blameless, generous, and kind, the end result is true happiness.”
Read if you read David Brooks columns non-ironically.
![](725b01b6054410900270c3d224acfea99b03efe1.jpeg?w=400&h=617)
How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton
Sample Advice: “There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness.”
Read if you have already listened to all available Ted Talks.
![](7ca7d943bd2a67c027b6f57b4cb313083d0bb3e1.jpeg?w=400&h=673)
What W.H. Auden Can Do For You by Alexander McCall Smith
Sample Advice: “He helps us have spiritual purpose.”
Read if you're a bestselling novelist with a love of poetry.
![](7b26cd8cdbf00abb29a92a96cc26537019948d5a.jpeg?w=400&h=619)
A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter by William Deresiewicz
Sample Advice: “You didn't have to be certain, Austen taught me, to be strong, and you didn't have to dominate people to earn their respect.”
Read if you're a callow Ivy League grad with an oversized ego.
![](eb571713babf164722539f7be4c4cc6fc6cbee9f.jpeg?w=400&h=601)
How To Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell
Sample Advice: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Read if you're a blogger in the middle of a life crisis.
![](8203c855a0b9f1dad7c056029c1f6f3aeaaa5eb6.jpeg?w=400&h=605)
Give War and Peace a Chance: Tolstoyan Wisdom for Troubled Times by Andrew D. Kaufman
Sample Advice: "Today’s tragedy often paves the way to tomorrow’s triumph."
Read if you're looking for something a little bit shorter than Tolstoy.
![](b0fa6eb844b7b8e2c2f68c5da399b986cc62ebf5.jpeg?w=400&h=640)
How to Be a Heroine by Samantha Ellis
Sample Advice: “Plath wasn’t advocating suffering: she was struggling and heroically wishing for rebirth and giving her readers that possibility too.”
Read if you can't decide if you're a Bronte or an Austen.