Alain de Botton has made it his goal to show how acquaintance with some of the world's greatest thinkers can offer comfort and enable happiness. Once an academic, de Botton left the ivory tower to write books for general audiences. His work presents topics as varied as airports, stoicism, cookies, shoe shining, and shipping, aiming throughout to help people lead meaningful lives. Interested? Check out these five Alain de Botton books:

• The Consolations of Philosophy argues that the world's most important philsophers taught tactics for dealing with the day to day business of life. Touring philosophical history, de Botton shows how great works can help readers overcome frustrations like heartbreak, austerity, and unhappiness.
• How Proust Can Change Your Life, likewise, offers Proust's novel Remembrance of Things Past as a unique self-help book. Culling a number of parables from Proust, de Botton presents lessons in a characteristically humorous style.
• The Architecture of Happiness investigates the often unnoticed — yet frequently deep — ways the spaces we inhabit impact our emotional well-being. This is a book that will change how you see the world around you.
• A Week at the Airport derived from time de Bottom spent at England's Heathrow airport, as writer-in-residence. De Botton views airports as peculiar modern spaces that concentrate beginnings and endings in a way made possible only by the airplane itself. Gorgeously illustrated and often quite moving, this might be the best introduction to de Botton's writing.
• The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work engages our most important occupation: working. De Botton turns an ethnographer's eye on businesses like logistics, career counseling, and cookie making in order to discover what it is that makes work meaningful.