Books about Paris

 I need to start keeping track of books I’ve read because I requested a bunch from the library but I have a feeling I already read some of them for the 2022 Christmas trip with Juan, Mandy and Louise.  Especially the ones by John Baxter, an Australian who has been living in Paris since 1989.  I know I have read two of his books on Great Parisian Neighborhoods:  Montmartre - Paris’s Village of Art and Sin, and The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris, but have I read Five Nights in Paris: After Dark in the City of Light or A Year in Paris:  Season by Season in the City of Light?  After a while these books all merge together but in the end, I figure that I will end up with a sense of Paris.  I could, of course, start putting the books in Good Reads, but often I don’t finish a book…. 

I am also spending a lot of time browsing through Let’s Eat Paris and Paris in a Basket: Markets - the Food and the People, a book that Penny sent me ages ago.  Several years ago I purchased Let’s Eat France which is an even more monumental book.  Or maybe it’s just that they’ve made the print smaller in Let’s Eat Paris so that they could shrink the size of the book, like Culinaria did with their paperback versions.  You truly need a magnifying glass to read them!

Of course that’s not all I’m doing to prepare for our trip.  OnYouTube I’ve been concentrating on Les Frenchies (I got behind while I was preparing for the London trip) and a new one by a French man, Paris Top Tips.  I’ve been watching Les Frenchies for a long time and can always find them but I can’t seem to remember the name Paris Top Tips.  Soon enough I’ll get back to watching some YouTube in French, like C’est Meilleur quand c’est bon and La Cuisine des Monasteres.  If they speak too fast, I can always slow down the playback to 75%.  Captions generally aren’t a lot of help since they have as much trouble catching the words as I have.

Should I try Duolingo?  I got off on the wrong foot with them when I tried to create an account and discovered someone else was logging in using my email address.  You would think that Duolingo would verify that.  So I changed the password on them and then requested that Duolingo delete the account. I don’t think I’ve been back since…