Please join this weekly meme. Grab a copy of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie? Take a photo in France? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even just a pastry? Or if you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We can take it.
Maybe we can all satisfy our yearnings for France, until we get there again.
This year, I lucked into a number of books set in France, both novels and memoirs. This week, I finished Bonjour 40: A Paris Travel Log by Karen A. Chase. Chase traveled to Paris to celebrate her 40th birthday and spent nearly 40 days in Paris with her boyfriend meeting her over there toward the end of her trip. She kept a travel blog and turned it into a book.
I'm not a short story reader, so maybe I'm not the typical reader for this book. I enjoyed some of the short posts, but I needed more meat to the story. I thought this book could instead make a great calendar with insights for every day.Even though the book was short, 132 pages in paperback, it took me quite a while to finish it. Nothing dragged me back to it. I read it on my Kindle so I would turn to it in my spare moments.
Toward the end I found some really lovely writing as Chase described moments of light and love in Paris.
The first was while we were bicycling along the Seine near the Grand Palais, our tires crunching through the gravel. The mid-afternoon sun was dappling through the thick canvas of leaves overhead, falling randomly onto the dusty path ahead of us. Ted and I rode on opposite sides of a long row of chestnut trees, seeing each other in between the darkened trunks, like a movie-reel slowed so you could see every photo-perfect frame.This memoir may interest you if you want some small bites of one person's trip to Paris.
9 comments:
I have so been wanting to read this one.
Based on your comments I'll skip this one, but I do love the cover. A calendar would be a great idea.
This might be perfect as e-book for me -- I tend to do better with the shorter ones.
Joy's Book Blog
The cover is beautiful and I think that I may add this book to my collection... and read it, too.
Bises,
Genie
The cover of this book is very pretty. If I have not been home to Paris in a while I stay away from books on France because then I get too homesick, and I have not been there this year. Last year I spent a week in Nice, so it was OK. I have been reading two books from the library on US city planning and zoning laws to understand the difference between French towns and US ones. It is very illuminating and now I understand why there is so much sprawl here, and why people like subdivisions- something I had never seen while growing up in France.
I'm late but I"m in. Thanks for the honest tip on the book. I read one like that too. Walk Across France was interesting in parts but it was pretty much the same day after day. I ended up just putting it down.
V
That cover is so compelling; too bad the innards didn't really appeal. The paragraph you highlighted was really lovely, the cinematic call out got me.
Good to know about this -- I may give it a pass, but I'll agree with those who love the cover. And maybe I'd loike it more!
I love the gorgeous cover too, sorry you didn't like it so much. I'm still pretty much a sucker for any of these Paris memoirs, so I'd like to check it out.
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