Book: The Five Love Languages, Gary Chapman

Self help books are always going to be controversial. Some people will swear by them, others will see them as a con, or the monetisation of common sense. Add to this that the book might be about love and relationships and it's inevitable to be the centre of an explosive discussion.

The truth is that, as with a lot of non fiction books of this nature, they're not for everyone. If you're good at relationships or are clearly emotionally intelligent, then a lot that you'll see in a book like this will be obvious or even vacuous. Similarly I can imagine someone who is naturally and innately into fitness rolling their eyes at dieting advice.

As in previous books of this type, the main thing I took away from The Five Love Languages was a framework with which to think about the subject of relationships and marriage. From that perspective, I found the book to be great in its analysis, but perhaps a little lacking in the solutions it offers. This could be because the book is a couple of decades old now. I found the classification of the five languages pretty striking and perhaps even obvious, and was even able to go as far as to recognise which ones I would most associate with myself.

So in many ways the naysayers might be right - the stuff in here is pretty obvious. But so is most things that people don't know, and as a piece of informal academia (rather than a practical guide to saving one's marriage), I think the book was a useful one.