Best for: Those who love Paris and enjoy learning more about specific neighborhoods (or in this case, a single street). In a nutshell: U.S. ex-pat and journalist Ms. Sciolino provides a look at the individuals who live and work on the Rue des Martyrs, providing current information and a look at the history of the street. Line that sticks with me: “A hardware store has been at No. 1 since 1865.” (p 56) Why I chose it: On our whirlwind visit to 19 independent books […]
“Going round the world too quickly is like attending a series of dinner parties and leaving with the soup.”
In 1959, The Sunday Times gave James Bond writer Ian Fleming a round-the-world plane ticket and charged him with quickly traveling through 14 of the world’s major cities. (Fleming had been foreign editor for the paper for some time previously.) The result is Fleming’s Thrilling Cities, a memorialized account of the writer’s experiences. While I am a known fan of the James Bond books (you’ll find several of my reviews on this very site), this little non-fiction gem is one of my favorites of all of Fleming’s books. […]
He’d spent time rehearsing this serene pose
This was a kind of a placeholder for me. I’m not allowing myself to reread American Gods again, because I reread it less than a year ago, and I love it too much, and the TV series is coming, and it’s my favorite kind of book, so I had to find a proxy, and this looked super interesting. And it was good, but not amazing (nothing is American Gods, goddamnit!). I think the hardest for me was that Ike is no hero, antihero, complicated scamp, […]
Take Me With You
August Shroeder is trying to complete a trip to Yellowstone that he had planned to take with his nineteen year old son, that is before his sun passed away. Instead of making the trip with his son, he is taking the trip with his son’s ashes. Unfortunately, he runs into problems right away, and he ends up at a mechanics to fix his vehicle. It now looks like this trip that he had been saving for and planned on taking, wasn’t going to happen. With the […]
The town, not the planet
In Dispatches from Pluto, British-born travel writer Richard Grant takes a trip to meet a friend in the Mississippi Delta, and ends up buying her father’s old plantation house. Moving his girlfriend and dog from a tiny Manhattan apartment, they throw themselves into Delta life – battling the snakes, armadillos and sometimes alligators that inhabit their garden, wrangling weeds that grow faster than they can yank them, hunting food for the table, discovering how hard it can be to heat a creaky old house […]
A Long Trip in a Zepplin
This is the first Terry Pratchett book that I’ve read not getting five stars, and there’s a part of me that feels bad about it, but this books just didn’t hit it for me. Maybe it was the fact that I listened to it on audio and it literally took me three weeks. Maybe it was too science fiction. Maybe it was just a little downright boring in some sections. Either way…. The Long Earth is a fantastic concept; there’s datem earth…our earth, but marching […]
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