Books like The Parks, Promenades, & Gardens of Paris — picked by fans

This book was my first introduction to planning parks for cities. That was produced with a well-illustrated text that evidenced the determination and commitment of generations of designers to provide cities with a healthy green infrastructure.

I liked it because it provided both a designer’s perspective as well as giving general context that I have since used as a starting point for my own observations and research. Due to its international remit, I also like to include it as a reference on any reading list for student work on public parks.

As an open space, garden, or park ‘open to and maintained by or for the public,’ the notion of the public park is primarily a Western concept that is interpreted and translated variously in different cultures.

I like this book because it links policy in the USA to the design of public parks and provides four typologies in its development from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. While I have not made much use of these typologies since they apply particularly to that American context, it has inspired me to look deeper into how what we do is directed by policies and how our designs reflect politics.

This book reminds me of a spell in Boston, in my first job, and I acquired it then as I was eager to take the opportunity to explore its famous park system. This title was recommended to me as the main source of reference. I was immediately attracted to it because it was well-illustrated and with a direct, clear, and accessible text that explained the progress of the project.

To me, it provided a concise context and background for the park system that became prototypical as ‘the emerald necklace,’ not only in the USA but also internationally. I like the way it also addressed the theoretical development, the design process, down to the very detail of the project, in what remains one of the few such critical monographs of a single landscape concept.

I like the way this book not only traces national and international influences on the development of public parks in Britain but also how they affected design and management. It is all set out in a clear narrative, and at the time of its initial publication, it was a pioneering study.

The contents of this volume have now been incorporated in an even more comprehensive volume ameliorated and edited by Paul Rabbits, which completes the story to the present day. I like it as a standard go-to and as a source of reference for the study of public parks in the UK, which served as such an important source of inspiration elsewhere. 

Why a book on Toulouse-Lautrec on a booklist about southern France? I might have asked myself that same question before visiting the region.

In the city of Albi, attached to the amazing 14th Century medieval cathedral there, I happened into the Toulouse-Lautrec Museum and learned he was born and raised in the town. After his death, his mother assembled the largest collection of his works, which are housed at this location. I became fascinated by his troubled and unusual life and followed him to Paris and the Moulin Rouge, where he became a famous Impressionist painter and pioneer of poster prints. 

This collection of essays by several experts deals not only with his unique early life, physical handicaps, and amazing, if troubled and short, career as an artist but also delves into the larger scene of turn-of-the-century Paris in 1900 at a time when the world of art was… show more.

Imagine National Treasure set in a magical Belle Epoque Paris featuring an ensemble of endearing thieves—I absolutely inhaled this story!

Chokshi’s writing is as luxurious as velvet, and her wit shines through in the antics of her characters as they set about solving riddles and stealing a series of magical artifacts. I fell in love with Severin and the rest of his crew, and I would give anything to wander the streets of this magical setting!

People often ask me what is the best book to take with them to Paris if they can only take one, and this is the book I always recommend. This collection of essays, which can easily fit into a purse or a backpack, is brimming over with fascinating stories about “the people, places, and phenomena” of Paris. Downie’s encyclopedic knowledge of history, and the idiosyncratic curiosity that draws him (and his readers along with him) into a variety of offbeat situations make for fun as well as highly informative reading. It’s a great book to take with you to read in Paris, or sitting at home dreaming of or remembering Paris—and the selection of topics is varied enough that I believe there’s something in it to interest almost anyone. 

Tom Wood immediately swept to the top of my list of great thriller writers when I read this book. It’s the first in the Victor Assassin series and its adrenaline-fuelled excitement gripped me from the first sentence to the final full stop.

Victor is hired to kill a man in Paris and to take the memory stick he is carrying, but Victor’s paymasters aren’t all they seem, and Victor quickly finds himself at the wrong end of a gun barrel when a hit squad is sent to eliminate him.

But Victor won’t be taken out that easily. He shoots his way free of the ambush and fights to stay alive long enough to work out who’s behind what’s happening. The underlying plot is slowly revealed and leads to a great dramatic conclusion.

In the third novel of Zola’s twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart, a man named Florent, accused of a crime he didn’t commit, escapes to Paris and becomes a fish inspector at the Les Halles market. Food and politics collide in the heart of the market, giving the reader some of the most vivid and delicious descriptions you’ll ever find on the page.

We are coded as homo sapiens to look at each other. To observe, study, analyse our fellow creatures. One of the reasons I’ll never live in the country is that I’ll miss observing urban life. 

This is such a simple book with a simple premise. Perec recorded everything he saw while sitting at a café on a Parisian square over three days. When I lived in Paris in the 1990s, I had a dog-eared French version of this book and I dutifully went to the same place. Not to record my own observations but to try and see things that Perec might have seen twenty years prior.

A city-dweller regards their city. This book is at once nothing and yet it is everything about urban life. I found in Perec a comrade in arms. The romantic in me insists on believing that the seeds for my later urban observations lie… show more.