Books like Two Dozen Eggs — picked by fans

This guide to Paris is a one-of-a-kind, thoroughly personal—almost private—address book that takes in such fanciful themes as acupuncturists, beekeepers, Bouquinistes, cabarets, fancy dress, Esperanto, and rose gardens.

It provides a vision of Paris that is so idiosyncratic, so fully lived, so persuasive and contagious, so far from cliché, pandering, and pretention, that I discover the city anew each time I browse its beautiful, letterpress printed pages. I think I first met Ivan and Benoît, the founders of Astier de Villatte, when I interviewed them for the first edition of Makers Paris, and since then, they have become my compass for living a bold life of beauty, fun, and freedom.

As the much-missed Karl Lagerfeld once said, “Fashion is a train that waits for nobody.” And that train comes whooshing through Paris quite a lot.

This book captures some of the inimitable energy and agitation of Paris Fashion Week, as self-taught photographer Meyabe covers six seasons—men’s, women’s, and couture—over a single year. It includes an introduction by local fashion hero Loïc Prigent and is published by my friends Alex and Marie from Ofr. (who also published Makers Paris #2).

Ofr. is an indie arts bookshop, gallery and publisher, always in the moment, that channels a certain bohemian spirit proper to Paris: “Open, Free and Ready”.

The much-loved English bookshop Shakespeare and Company can at times feel like a victim of its own success (every so often I try and imagine solutions as if I were trying to save Venice!), but the place remains a refuge for writers and readers and a true beacon of bohemian values.

In my first Makers book, owner Sylvia remembers her father George describing Paris: “where poetry is part of life; where men are poets and life is a poem.” And now the bookshop has published its own collection of poems about Paris, illustrated with beautiful line drawings by the Italian illustrator Matteo Pericoli.

Alongside verses by Rimbaud, Gregory Corso, or Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pericoli imagines the views from windows of poets who, at one time or another, made their homes here, like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas or Charles Baudelaire, or indeed Shakespeare and Company’s own beautiful view across the… show more.

This fascinating book plunges the reader into the avant-garde effervescence of the Roaring Twenties in Paris, presenting serious historical scholarship about the era alongside the author’s own take on classic cocktails like the Sazerac or the Highball. It provides, to quote the author Franck Audoux (in my book Makers Paris), “a kind of cultural snapshot of an era, to show how the cocktail, like jazz or the Charleston, participated in the reconstruction of a new society after the carnage of the First World War”.

One of the founders of the game-changing restaurant Le Châteaubriand, Franck is a pillar of the indie food and drinks scene here. This book is the fertile soil from which his current project, Cravan, grows. Named after Oscar Wilde’s nephew, the poet and boxer Arthur Cravan, Cravan is a contemporary cocktail bar rooted in the “French Modern.” 

For my study, Benjamin succeeds in showing how the dominant social forms in each capitalist society can be debunked and that the official narrative that perpetuates the logic that supports the current system can be seriously questioned.

Benjamin’s goal was not to build another totality, another theoretical system that would bring certainty and stability to those who want to change the world radically towards socialism.

Rather, his philosophy encourages us to continue fighting to open the cracks in capitalism, to create multiple ruptures in the capitalist system, even though we do not have all the answers and are aware that our struggle will have an uncertain result.

This is how we redeem and vindicate past generations who spilled their blood for another world. This is how we redeem Benjamin himself, who dedicated his life's work to this purpose.

One of the original Aussie literary expats in the 1940s, Kershaw penned this slim but sparkling memoir of his time in Paris and rural France before his death in 1995.

It is superbly written and completely unknown. Grab a copy if you’re lucky enough to find it. It proves that books don’t have to be long to stick in the memory. Sometimes, the shortest ones are the best. 

You may know this book as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but you probably don’t really know it. Films, most notably the Disney cartoon, have grossly distorted this novel, often having Esmeralda ride off into the sunset with Phoebus. But the novel is really a very dark, Gothic story of love and lust, and one of the first existential novels. Frollo and Quasimodo both love Esmeralda, but she loves Phoebus, and he only loves himself. In the end, everyone dies, allowing their lust to destroy their common sense. Hugo wrote it to help popularize and save Notre-Dame Cathedral from falling into further disrepair. It influenced British author William Harrison Ainsworth to write The Tower of London, thus revitalizing British Gothic in a new way just as it did French Gothic.

I love weaving history into my mysteries so I was drawn to this dark tale of Paris in the Belle Époque. An English girl goes to Paris to study art but, desperately poor, throws her fate into the hands of some shady characters. The atmosphere and scene-setting of Paris during a terrible rainy winter are unforgettable. 

This splendid biography traces the life and times of the Marquise Du Châtelet, born in Paris in December 1706, who became one of the most erudite women of her époque. For fifteen years she was the companion to Voltaire, the best-known of the French philosophes. She mastered calculus and translated Newton’s Principia, in addition to carrying on an active social life and raising several children. She died at the age of 42, following the birth of a daughter conceived with another lover. The author explains her subject’s life course as “from a life of frivolity to a life of the mind.” It’s a great read.

I loved this story about a protagonist who is living her worst nightmare, and we’re along for the unpredictable twists and turns of her life.

The story is everything you’d expect for a well-conceived psychological drama where true-to-life characters come alive and live the nightmare you’re glad isn’t your own. It held my attention and wouldn’t let go!