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… 

Books on Paris

 Yes, I got a bunch of Paris guide books out of the library but quickly came to the conclusion that I don't really care for guide books.  They are so boring because they never cover what I want to know or what I might like to see and they really don't provide a whole lot more than a description and an address.

So I took out some deeper books about Paris.  At the moment I am reading The Streets of Paris: A guide to the City of Light following in the footsteps of famous Parisians throughout history.  And I'm learning a lot of history I didn't know, so that's a really good thing, even if I can't remember what I read when I get to Paris.  Now I know that Henri IV was a Protestant from Navarre and that Louis IX was horrid if you were a Jew or Muslim, but a saint if you were the Catholic church.  I learned that Marie Curie was from Poland where she couldn't attend higher education and so came to Paris, that Simone Weil was a philosopher that I'd never heard of, and that Voltaire was probably a bastard.  The author of The Streets of Paris, Susan Cahill, also wrote Hidden Gardens of Paris which Juan is currently reading to find all the playgrounds for Louise.  Will the slides be too cold to slide down?

I've already completed The Only Street in Paris:  Life on the Rue des Martyrs, written by Elaine Sciolino, a former New York Times bureau chief in Paris.  That's also worth reading to give you a flavor of life in Paris and the individuals  who own the shops along this street that runs up to Montmartre.  You'll find out what happens when the fishmonger closes up shop, who's been running the transvestite club at the top of Rue des Martyrs for decades, who owns the bookshops and what a friperie is.  Each individual is unique with their own little quirks.  Naturally you also learn about whom the Rue des Martyres was named after, what Saint Denis carried up the hill (or was it down?), and where St. Ignatius de Loyola started his little band of Jesuits.  There's a story behind each location, something missing in typical guide books, which makes the book much more readable.

Coming up are two books by Eric Hazan:  The Invention of Paris:  A History in Footsteps; and A Walk Through Paris: A Radical Exploration.  Hopefully I'll get around to reading them and reviewing them!