The Prix Goncourt is France’s highest award for fiction, and the most recent recipient was Éric Vuillard for The Order of the Day. It’s an interesting choice for at least three reasons. First, it’s really good, like prize-winning good, written in crystalline sentences ably translated by Mark Polizzotti. Second, it’s not a bog-standard war story about generals and …
Any child psychologist will tell you it’s a bad idea to compare siblings to each other. Ask big sis why her room isn’t as neat as her younger brother’s and she won’t clean it up, she’ll drop out of school and ride off on a motorcycle to the tattoo shop. It’s probably not a good …
A close friend recommended this book, Murder on the Eiffel Tower by Claude Izner*. She knew that I like books set in different times in history and in different places. Even better, there are several books in this series. Victor Legris owns a bookstore in Paris (a good start) in the year 1889. There is a World’s …
Fi-Fi, Foo-Foo, Ooh-La-La, and Gaston: Mrs. Poodle’s new puppies, one of whom–guess who?–doesn’t look quite like the others. In fact, he looks rather bulldogish, which becomes particularly interesting when Mrs. Bulldog and her four puppies, Rocky, Ricky, Bruno, and Antoinette, show up at the park. Gaston is a wise tale, whose message about identity and belonging, but …
The sky is a perfect, cloudless azure, it’s 32 degrees Celsius, and I’m on a Mediterranean beach with sand as fine as confectioner’s sugar. Which is lovely, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t have sunglasses with me and the glare off the white page is enough to melt the eyeballs of the most dauntless …
In 2011, my wife and I visited Oradour-sur-Glane in France. It has a small but nice museum through which you must travel in order to see the burned out village. While volunteering at our local library, I recently “discovered” a book about the village. Another book, Oradour by Robin Mackness, was also recommended. I decided to read …
