100 Books Like Paris Letters

Who could resist this first line? “I slept with my French husband halfway through our first date.”  Not me!  Elizabeth Bard, in Paris for the weekend, sits down to lunch with a handsome Frenchman and falls in love.  

Bard reveals how, despite her dreams of success, she was able to reinvent herself after marrying a Frenchman and moving to France. The included recipes run the gamut from what he cooked for her after they first made love to French dinner party food and traditional favorites from her American-Jewish family. 

This memoir of finding a new life in the City of Lights is well-written, humorous, and personal. If you, like me, have ever fantasized that Paris could change your life, this book is a must-read.

Disclosure: This memoir is by a high school classmate. Georgeanne Brennan is an award-winning cookbook author (James Beard award), writer, and teacher who specializes in food with a Mediterranean slant. Her delightful memoir tells the fascinating true story of her move to Provence, France, in the 1970s with her husband and a toddler. 

Brennan writes about changing one’s life, raising goats, learning to make cheese, hunting for truffles, and eating luscious meals with neighbors. She makes me want to move to the French countryside. If only I could speak French!

I loved the descriptions of food and the traditional ways of preparing and eating it in a French village. Each chapter ends with one of Georgeanne’s delicious recipes for a Provencal dish. What a bonus!

The subtitle, Lessons in Food and Love from a Year in Paris, drew me to this memoir of a woman stranded in the city of her dreams without her husband. She fills her lonely days learning about French food. I enjoyed the memoir’s structure. Each chapter studies an iconic local dish: the history of the dish, the way it is made, her travels to find it, and tasting...lots of tasting. Her recipes, adjusted for American kitchens, are the bonus de resistance.  

But Mah doesn’t write only about food. She also shares her struggles with loneliness, missing her husband, and finding her way around France on her own. I totally recommend this personal and informative memoir by a Chinese American Francophile. 

While my previous three recommended memoirs feature French cooking, this one is about the Caribbean. In the early 1990s, the author and her husband rented their home and moved onto a 42-foot sailboat for a two-year sailing escapade.  

I loved this memoir for its descriptions of high adventure and the dangers of a sailing life. Vanderhoof’s wonderful selection of recipes stem from her experiences cooking in a tiny, sea-going kitchen. Starting with Chesapeake Bay crabcakes, Ann progresses to curried lobster, stewed conch, and Piῆa Colada cheesecake. 

Storms, friends, danger, repairs, the search for local food, and cooking combine to create a page-turning and delicious story—for me, a memoir similar to my own life-changing experience and resulting memoir.

Due to the title, and the fact that the authors of this book edited my 3rd book, this may seem to be a redundant choice on my part. But I can assure the reader that it is not. Although a fine photo of Kiki also graces the cover, she plays a minor, more metaphoric role in the grand scheme of this large-format work, and only a handful of pages are devoted to her.

On the inside of the cover, and the first thick page to its right, one is presented with 96 roughly 1”x 2” black & white thumbnail photographs, not alphabetically arranged, but as it happens, beginning with a photo image of a portrait of Louis XIV in the top left corner and finishing in the bottom right corner of the following page with a photo of James Joyce. All those photos in between should tip off the reader… show more.

I love a good story about artists who refuse to play by the rules, and Kiki Man Ray was exactly that. Her story hit me because it’s all about pushing boundaries, no matter who tries to shut the door.

What I loved most was how alive this book made that era feel. It’s like I could almost hear the jazz, feel the cigarette smoke in the air, and get lost in the chaos of Montparnasse. It’s the kind of energy that makes you want to create and exist loudly and I love it!

Marc Chagall is a household name to arts aficionados, but his daughter Ida was also renowned in the Paris art world before World War II. This lovely novel tells of the overbearing way Chagall treated Ida and how he viewed her more as an assistant than a daughter. And when she married, he painted “The Wedding Chair” as a gift to her, which represented his anger at her leaving. This novel helped bring about a new trend to recount the untold stories of women alongside—or even in front of—famous men.

John Baxter is a master at his craft. He describes his life in Paris in a vivid, easy-to-read style, never failing to delve into the history of the streets he is roaming. He has published a number of books on Paris and its historic neighbourhoods, all immersing the reader in the sights, sounds, and culture of Paris. This is probably the next best thing to living in Paris yourself. 

Set in the Alps, this was always going to be a top book for me.

It features friends, secrets and snow and a ski trip that goes horribly wrong. I enjoyed the suspense, the evocative scenery, and the layers of twists.

It’s a fun whodunnit set against my favourite scenery. What’s not to love?

I love books written by multiple authors. Some of the greatness of this multi-author work comes from the fact that 28 different scholars have contributed to it, many of them working in pairs to create new insights they might not have been able to achieve alone.

Some chapters compare an aspect of Canadian Jewish life with that of another religious or ethnic minority in Canada (for example, Chinese, Muslims, and Métis). Other chapters compare an aspect of Canadian Jewish life with that of Jewish communities in other countries (including Australia, France, and the Former Soviet Union).

So, I reaped the benefit of learning about Canadian Jews through various comparative perspectives. I found virtually all of the essays in it to be stimulating, approachable, and punchy-short, so I didn’t feel compelled to read the whole thing cover to cover, uninterrupted by another book. I just went back to it, bit… show more.