You are what you read

I'm currently reading this article in the Guardian, which focuses on the reading habits of the Brits, the French, and the Americans during the holidays. For example, it points that Americans in general prefers to buy self-help books. This fact doesn't surprise me because Americans are so practical that they believe that anything can be taught and that there is a secret formula to having a successful life. The French on the other hand are more idealistic and prefer to believe that it is more important to learn philosophical principles rather than just the knowhow, which is meaningless if you don't understand the why of things. I agree with them. Sugary excerpt:

The Americans go for self-help books, the French buy unreadable philosophy books and the British buy books filled with trivia, which are often made up and generally aimed at being funny," Nielsen adds. "Those are the stereotypes, and they're not completely misleading."

In France, certainly, they buy a different kind of book. In amazon.fr's chart of the top 20 bestselling titles this Christmas is one by Schopenhauer. True, it comes in at 19, and it isn't the German pessimist's symphonic chef d'oeuvre The World as Will and Representation, but L'Art d'avoir toujours raison, a book on how to win arguments. But let's not spoil the story. As you know, Schopenhauer's most trenchant philosophical observation was that humans are eternally tormented by desire and it is only in the stilling of the human will - be it through disinterested aesthetic contemplation or ascetic renunciation - that one can elude the penal servitude of willing and, as he poetically put it in book three of his masterpiece, avoid our human fate, namely to be "constantly lying on the revolving wheel of Ixion".