Dreaming of France -- Le Road Trip

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.
I'm not sure why this book sat on my shelf for so long before I finally picked it up to read it. It was a quick fun read with lots of illustrations and love for France.
The author, Vivian Swift, compares travelling to falling in love. She retells the story of her 2005 honeymoon with her husband James, along with relating the travels to previous trips she took starting in the 1970s.
Swift must be drawing and journaling constantly as she travels, sharing her insights and quirky illustrations.

I loved her insights on fashion for tourists and the French,  and the simplest drawings of gates outside buildings or pastries or sunsets.
Here's a photo I took of one of the pages. You can see that Swift illustrated and romanticized the different windows that she saw in French buildings. For instance, she said the top left window could be "poet's garret, maid's room, foreign studentin in the attic." I like the one in the second row from the top on the right, which she dubs "Novelist's atelier." No doubt I'll be staring out of a window like that as I write one day.

My other favorite part of the book was her trip to Normandy and her decription of Gustave Flaubert's desperation to leave the provinces. It sounded so much like my own teenage boys.

"My youth steeped me in an opiate of bordeom sufficient for the remainder of my days," Swift quoted Flaubert about why he wrote Madame Bovary.

And another quote from Flaubert in a letter to his friend. "I loathe it, I despise it. Oh, Attila, when wilt thou return, kind humanitarian, with 400,000 horsemen, to set fire to this land of trouser straps and suspenders." Obviously, Swift has inspired me to read Flaubert.

Swift started her journey in Paris then travelled to Normandy, Brittany, Bordeaux, the Loire Valley, Chartres and back to Paris.

I enjoyed travelling through France with Swift and her new husband. You should consider taking Le Road Trip too.

First Paragraph, Tuesday Teaser -- Le Road Trip

Every Tuesday, Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posts the first paragraph of her current read. Anyone can join in. Go to Diane's website for the image and share the first paragraph of the current book you are reading.
This is like a meme within a meme, because I'm taking part in Diane's First Chapter First Paragraph, but my emphasis this month is on France with the Paris in July meme sponsored byThyme for Tea and Bookbath.
One more French book. This one, by Vivian Swift, is Le Road Trip. She calls it "part journal," "part instruction manual" for a traveling lifestyle in France. It's kind of hard to pinpoint the first paragraph here because the book is set up kin of newspaper style with different columns. I'm going with this paragraph because it seems to start the story.

When I was 19 years old I worked in the office of a factory that made industrial gauges. All day long I filled out shipping forms, by hand, in pencil, which I then handed over to a skilled worker -- the typist.
I understood, from the names on theses shipping forms, that gauges were used to manufacture a variet of liquid and gassy things, from beer to chemical weapons.
Gauges. They are a dreary way to view the wonders and evils of human enterprise.
It was my first day back at work after the New Year holidays of 1975. I stared at a stack of shipping forms and suddenly knew that I had to quit this life. I had to go to Paris.

Also this week is Teaser Tuesdays.
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along!
Open to a random page of your current read and share a teaser sentence from somewhere on that page.
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS!
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers.
Here's mine from page 21, under "Tips About What to Wear in Paris":

Three Truths: One: You are not Parisian and you never will be. Don't let that bother you. Two: Parisians don't want to know you, no matter how well you dress, so you might as well be yourself. Three: Deep down, Parisians are crazy jealous that they can't let loose like us crazy Americans.

I've loved participating in Paris in July and getting to learn about great new books set in France and experiences that people have had. I hope that next summer, I'll be able to use a first paragraph from my own book The Summer of France as a First Paragraph and Tuesday Teaser meme. Until then, Bon Voyage.