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By Root 987 0

less than enormously enthusiastic endorsements and I encourage you to read as many of the books as you can.) One reason I do not include many excerpts from books in my series is that I am not convinced an excerpt will always lead a reader to the book in question, and good books deserve to be read in their entirety. Art critic John Russell wrote an essay, in 1962, entitled “Pleasure in Reading,” in which he stated, “Not for us today’s selections, readers, digests, and anthologizings: only the Complete Edition will do.” Years later, in 1986, he noted that “bibliographies make dull reading, some people say, but I have never found them so. They remind us, they prompt us, and they correct us. They double and treble as history, as biography, and as a freshet of surprises. They reveal the public self, the private self, and the buried self of the person commemorated. How should we not enjoy them, and be grateful to the devoted student who has done the compiling?” The section of a nonfiction book I always turn to first is the bibliography, as it is there that I learn something about the author who has done the compiling as well as about other notable books I know I will want to read.

When I read about travel in the days before transatlantic flights, I always marvel at the number of steamer trunks and baggage people were accustomed to taking. If I were traveling back then, however, my trunks would have been filled with books, not clothes. Although I travel light and seldom check bags, I have been known to fill an entire suitcase with books, secure in the knowledge that I’ll have them all with me for the duration of my trip. The advent of lightweight electronic reading devices can make luggage much less heavy, but there are always some titles I absolutely have to have in a paper-and-cover format.

Each recommended reading section features titles I feel are the best available and most worth your time. I realize that “best” is subjective; readers will simply have to trust me that I have been extremely thorough in deciding which books to recommend. I have not hesitated to list out-of-print titles because some of the most excellent books ever written about Paris and France are (sadly) out of print (and deserve to be returned to print!), and are worthy of your best efforts to track them down—most of them can be found at libraries, used-book stores, or online booksellers that deal in out-of-print volumes. (Abebooks.com is my favorite online source.) A wonderful online piece called “Tales of the Unread,” at the nifty Web site The Second Pass, makes the observation that “publishers naturally want to tell you about what’s new or what’s evergreen. But most readers know the pleasure of somehow discovering and falling in love with a book that has fallen from view.” Great books are great books, whenever they were published, and what’s “old” to one reader is “new” to another. That’s the wonderful thing about books! There are undoubtedly titles with which I’m unfamiliar and therefore do not appear here, and I hope you’ll let me know if a favorite of yours is missing. Bibliophiles, no matter how many books they have, love nothing better than to discover yet another book or author on a subject about which they’re passionate.

I also believe the leisure reading you bring along should be related in some way to where you’re going, so these lists include fiction and poetry titles that feature Parisian or French characters or settings. (I do not always annotate these titles, as my aim is simply to inform you of the numerous choices available.) I’m especially fond of historical fiction, and recently I was pleased to discover that Roger Sutton, editor in chief of The Horn Book, a wonderful magazine dedicated to children’s and young adult literature, is, too. “Historical fiction,” he writes, “is not only one excellent way to explain our parents (or grandparents) to ourselves, it can also explain ourselves to ourselves, allowing readers to consider what they might have done, or how they might have been different, in circumstances unlike their own. We don’t