Wuthering
Expectations

I am going to make some comments here that are likely wrong.   They are based on my observations at the moment, that is all.   Please sprink...

Since I could read, I read.   I studied French in the winter and spring mostly by reading French, lots of it, in many forms, constrained onl...

What did I read when I was, in French terms, 9 years-old?   Just some examples, aside from Le Petit Prince and Petit Nicolas and Asterix ...

What do I do, I read, right, so I was reading French from the beginning.   French books and French bookstores identify reading level clearly...

Is language learning interesting?   I mean, other people’s language learning?   I mean, mine.   I am not sure.   Maybe someone will find thi...

If you find yourself in France for an extended period, a couple of months, even, you are crazy not to track down and join the local branch o...

A better view of the Quais du Polar bookstore on Sunday morning.   I figured out that I could go upstairs for a picture.   While we were wai...

The core of the Quais du Polar is a giant bookstore.   The big hall of the Bourse, the 19th century stock exchange, is occupied by ten local...

The Quais du Polar , Lyon’s author-centered celebration of the polar , the crime novel, begins tomorrow.   Readers of Book around the Corner...

In Lisbon, where I vacationed recently, images of Fernando Pessoa were everywhere, in street art, on mugs and shirts and puzzles, even on bo...

I was recently on vacation, in Lyon and Burgundy, a food-and-wine vacation, of little literary interest.  Well, try the Memoirs of Phillipp...

For the last four days, for just two hours a day, a big chunk of the center of Lyon has been converted into a kind of artsy urban theme park...

The Lumière film festival is wrapping up as I write.  Lyon is the city where film was invented, more or less, by the Lumière brothers, and ...

The Frankfurt Book Fair originated soon after the invention of the Gutenberg printing press.  I recently browsed through a history of early ...

The point of photographing this horror, advertised all over Lyon, is not to note that potheads are everywhere but rather to puzzle over the ...

“The food” is good in France, I am told.  And it is.  After a month in Paris, we have relocated more permanently to Lyon, long known as the ...

In the museums you will find acres of the most strange and fascinating things; but all museums are fascinating, and they do so tire your eye...

Paris is empty in August, I read, a “ghost town.”   It is like having it to myself.  “Everyone” goes on vacation for a month.  I am Googling...

With a deep sigh of relief, the traveler turned back to France.  There he felt safe.  ( Education , Ch. XXXI) The Education of Henry Adams ...

Henry Adams is for some reason reading Poincaré’s La Science et l’Hypothèse , which purported to be relatively readable.  Trusting in its ex...