Vintage 1954 (2018) by Antoine Laurain #ParisinJuly2024

🍾 The year 1954, wine and UFO. These are three elements that Antoine Laurain had woven into a fantastic time-travelling story set in Paris.

🍾 1954 was historically the year of UFO sightings wave in France. Almost every day there were news of strange phenomenon in their newspapers. In this particular story, a winegrower called Pierre Chaveau was walking across a vineyard in Beaujolais when he experienced a UFO sighting. Fast forward to 1978. The old Pierre Chaveau was having a family dinner at home. He unwittingly drank a vintage wine produced from the very place and time of his UFO sighting - Beaujolais, 1954. His dog also tasted the wine that night. The following morning he left the house for a walk with his dog, and mysteriously disappeared.

🍾 Fast forward again to 2017 in an apartment building in Paris. Monsieur Hubert Larnaudie, the property owner/manager; Julien and Magalie, residents; and an American Airbnb tenant Bob, founnd themselves in an awkward moment one day, which would cement their friendship. To celebrate a triumph over a previous apartment struggle, Hubert opened a bottle of vintage wine he found on his cellar, and shared it with his new friends. The wine was 1954 Beaujolais! The next morning, the four friends discovered themselves transported back in time, to the Paris of 1954.

🍾 What follows are highly entertaining piece in three stages. The shocking moment when they realized their predicaments are quite hilarious. Their euro coins received with suspicion, public transportation changed to vintage systems. They were naturally shocked at first, but then came the determination to seek a way to return to 2017. But in the process, they also had a lot of fun while exploring the 1954 of Paris. There's Les Halles, which was still existed, where they could explore the Belly of Paris in Zola's universe. And there's the personages they encountered - and for some, hung up with - Salvador Dalí, Jean Gabin, Édith Piaf. That was a glorious time for our four friends.

🍾 But the main business remained. They must go back to their own time. Could they do it properly? What surprises awaited them? And if they do come back, what will happen then? Two things for sure, their perspectives of life changed for good, and in the end they have forged a friendship that would last a lifetime.

🍾 Laurain did it again! This is a wholesome read, very entertaining, fast-paced, and memorable. The atmospheric of 1954 Paris is the main highlight for me.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2

Read for:

Paris in July 2024

hosted by Emma @ Words and Peace

The Daily Francophile Playlist #ParisInJuly2024

Besides reading French or French-themed books for #ParisinJuly, I have a habit of compiling French music playlist to listen to during the month. This list is growing from year by year, and for this year, I am compiling a special playlist from the master list, which I call my Daily Francophile Playlist. It consists of cheerful or comforting and uplifting songs that I can play from morning to evening, depends on my mood. Not continually, of course, but from time to time. Here they are:

Dave Coz: Together Again (1999) from album: The Dance

I know this is neither a French song nor written/played by a French musician, but it always reminds me of Paris. 24 years ago I went to Paris with a friend. But we arrived separately; I was one day earlier. 24 hours in Paris, I felt homesick and lonely. I haven't spoken to anyone, except for asking direction or ordering food. I had had dinner in a little bistro the night before and the other dinners asked me where I came from, where is Indonesia, etc. Apart from that, I was alone all day. That afternoon, while spending time before picking up my friend from the metro station, I had a walk. Suddenly from a fashion boutique came a familiar sound - it's Dave Koz' Together Again! That song was my favorite at that time, I used to play it all the time at home. Hearing it far away in Paris, was really comforting. I didn't feel alone anymore. Since then, I always associate Together Again to my wonderful moments in Paris. It's a song I would listen to whenever I feel wretched, and it never fails to uplift my spirit. That's why it has to be included in my Francophile playlist. It's playful tune fits with Paris vibes too, don't you think?

From Paris in July 2023 I've been falling in love with Tatiana Eva-Marie & Avalon Jazz Band's music. Here are some of them that I enjoy the most. One is Cole Porter's song, the rests are mostly from Charles Trenet - I love their cheerful tone!

💐 I Love Paris (Cole Porter)
💐 Fleur Bleu (Charles Trenet)
💐 Un Rien Me Fait Chanter (Charles Trenet)
💐J'ai ta main (Charles Trenet)
💐 Ménilmontant (Charles Trenet)
💐 Qu'est ce qu'on attend pour être heureux (Paul Misraki & André Hornez)

These two are from their album Je suis Swing:

💐 La complainte de la Butte
💐 Coquette

Here are my two latest finds from YouTube:

From Flonflon Révolution/Flonflon Syndicate:
💐 Gitan Swing
💐 Nostalgie d'Amour
💐 Swing Valse

This one is for my after work relaxation, to be played while having dinner, perhaps...

From Flonflon Syndicate
💐 La Folle Complainte

And finally to close the day, here are mini concerts that I love:

Sébastian Giniaux Quartet
YouTube Channel: Auberge Des Vergers


Are you familiar with these songs? Do you have a special #ParisinJuly playlist?

Manx Gold by Agatha Christie #AgathaChristieSS24

💰 Cousins, as well as lovers/fiancées, Fenella and Juan, gets a surprise from their deceased uncle. He bequeathed his gold to his next of kin, but in competition. He had hidden the gold in four locations, and whoever of the four candidates (Fenella and Juan counted as one, and there are two others) can find them, the treasures will be theirs.

💰 Fenella and Juan get 24 hours advanced start because their Uncle knew the others are cunning and unscrupulous. He was right. Just after first treasure was found, one of the two was murdered. So now, the treasure hunt turned to a dangerous game.

💰 To be honest, this is a disappointment for me. Judging from the synopsis, I thought it would be a proper, albeit short, treasure hunt with a murder. In reality, there was a hunt, but the readers didn't know what's going on most of the time. After getting a clue in rhyme, for instance, it would run like this: "I think it's located at (...). Then they went to the spot, searching for a while, and then "I found it! Let's go to the next clue". Just like that, and the readers were not involved in the searching at all. It read like a news about a treasure hunt, not a story. 

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

The Girl Who Reads on the Métro (2017) by Christine Féret-Fleury #ParisInJuly2024 #20booksofsummer24

💛 Juliette doesn't love her 9-5 job at the real estate agent, but she loves her metro journey to the office every day. Juliette lives a melancholic life as an ordinary young woman, a life ruled by monotony, devoid of either purpose or passion. Her sole entertainment are two things: books and imagination.

💛 Besides her love for reading, she loves to imagine the lives of her fellow metro passengers, through books they read every day. There's a woman who always cries when she gets to page 247 of the same book she always read on the Metro. Then, an ornithologist who loves reading book about insects, and a lady with her cook book. Juliette's imagination brings colors to her otherwise bleak existence.

💛 Her life changes when Juliette passes a different road to office, and notices a curious little bookstore with a book wedged on its gate. Intuitively she enters the tranquil courtyard which feels like another world from the hustle bustle of Paris. There she becomes acquainted to Soliman, the bookshop owner, and his daughter Zaide, and without realizes what's happening, Juliette agrees to be a passeur.

💛 Soliman's bookshop isn't an ordinary one. He hired passeurs who match books with people they see - books that they would need or books that match their personalities. The kind of occupation that suits Juliette perfectly and correlated to what she's been doing lately on the Metro. But her biggest life change didn't happen until Soliman asked her to move into his house to take care of little Zaide while he's away.

💛 This is the kind of book without much of a plot. Its strength lays on the beautiful writing and its deep understanding of human struggles and the power of books to heal or guide human lives. I would love it better if it tells us more about the bookshop and the passeur concept. Are the secondhand books passed on to people freely, or should they pay for them? Because Juliette only passes them on to people, there are never any transaction. And if they are free, then how the bookshop keep itself running? If the books are sold from the shop, but some of it are passed on to readers, there are no hints of business along the story. These aspects made the story less relatable to me, though I love the bookshop itself - the tranquil hushed-up atmosphere which seemed to transport me to a secret alley in Paris which is hidden from tourists.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐1/2

Read for:

Paris in July 2024

hosted by Emma @ Words and Peace

20 Books of Summer 2024
hosted by Cathy @ 746 Books

Six Degrees of Separation, from Kairos to The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax

Six Degrees of Separation is a monthly meme, now hosted by Kate @ books are my favorite and best.

On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

This month we start from yet another book I haven't read:

0. Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck

"An unforgettably compelling masterpiece—tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after. In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears." ~ Goodreads

I feel a bit lazy today, so I'm going to do this in easiest possible way. My first chain would be a classic by another German author:

1. The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by E.T.A. Hoffman

A Christmas classic I've read for the first time last year. I have never seen the ballet, but suspect that it would be much more beautiful than the book.

Another book with boy and girl siblings secondary characters but with no less importance to the story is...

2. Scarlet Feather by Maeve Binchy

It was my first Binchy, but loved it very much, I'll definitely read more of her. I read this for the last Ireland Month.

I would link this to another book with the word "scarlet" in the title:

3. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

It was called a classic for a reason. I found layer upon layer of depth beneath the story that I produced a lot of posts around it.

Still linking words in title, here's a book with "letter" in the title:

4. Dear Paris: The Paris Letters Collection by Janice MacLeod

I learned so much more about Paris from this collection of illustrated letters than from any other sources before. What a joyful book to read!

Another play with the same words in the title, my next chain shares the word Paris :

5. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris by Paul Gallico

A British charwoman won a lottery to buy her dream Dior dress in Paris was the most delightful read you'd come across!

For the last chain, here's another book with "Mrs" in the title, which shares similar elderly women who still have some spirits left in them for another life-changing adventures:

6. The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman

A charming, funny, and sweet story to enjoy, with spy-adventures - rather than thriller. It's also a good way of learning a little about the Cold War and Albanian culture in the 1950s.


Have you read those books? If you do #sixdegree, how it worked out for you this time?

Madam, Will You Talk? (1955) by Mary Stewart #ParisInJuly2024 #20booksofsummer24

🚘 Set in the 1950s (about ten years after WWII), a British widow named Charity Selborne is on holiday in Provence with her friend Louise. At the hotel she gets acquainted with a 13-year-old boy and his dog who introduced himself (the boy, not the dog) as David Shelley. Now, Mrs. Selborne was formerly a teacher and is very fond of poems. The boy's name Shelley naturally amused her, and the fact that the boy himself knows of the poet David Shelley. So casually she's jokingly mentioning David Byron, at which, surprisingly, she noticed David turned pale.

🚘 That incident later on became a significant clue to the forthcoming events that will completely change Charity's life. Another important clue related to poets or poems is that another guest of the hotel who was reading T.S. Eliot at breakfast. There's yet another poet-related fact to this story - Charity learned from other guest that David is actually the son of Richard Byron, an antique dealer who had been accused of murder. Mrs. Bristol, who's travelling with David, is Byron's second wife, and David stepmother.

🚘 David and Mrs. Bristol are clearly scared and worried, but of what it who? Charity got the answer when she took David to a local trip, where a man called Richard Coleridge chatted with her - yet another poet! His reaction when she let slip that she knew David, md his persistent question of David's whereabouts made her realize that the man was none other that Richard Byron - David's father, the murderer. Thanks to Charity's quick thinking, she and David had time to flee from Byron's clutch. But how long will it take for him to trace them?

🚘 From the queen of romantic mystery genre, this is more of a gripping thriller with high-speed car chase scenes from Provence to Marseilles, than a mystery. Charity turned out to be a terrific driver and quite a resourceful heroine with iron nerves, though not of the same quality as a sleuth. The romance is cliché, and I think I prefer a proper mystery with a sprinkle of romance than an equal portion of romance and mystery. The romance here feels a bit rushed to be plausible, but too much for just a sprinkle to spice up the thriller. All in all, it's an entertaining page-turner book, where you could explore the roads of Provence and Marseilles in the 1950s.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐1/2

Read for:

Paris in July 2024

hosted by Emma @ Words and Peace

20 Books of Summer 2024
hosted by Cathy @ 746 Books

Perestroika in Paris (2020) by Jane Smiley #ParisInJuly2024 #20booksofsummer24

🐴 Perestroika, or Paras for short, is a racehorse. But as much as she loves racing - the adrenaline rush when flying to the finish line - Paras is, by nature, a curious filly. One day her caretaker forgot to lock her stall door, and Paras found her first freedom. She didn't run away, just tasting the fresh grass outside, here and there (grass tastes differently in different place, you know). Further and further she wandered, until she's near Place du Trocadero, where she met Frida.

🐴 Frida is not a stray dog. She used to belong to a street performer who loved to wander along Paris. But after he died, Frida has been living by herself, remembering that she must not act like a stray, or else the gendarmerie would take her to "prison". And Frida hates confinement. When she first met Paras, Frida was more interested in the thing that Paras brought - the caretaker's purse - than of the horse itself. From her living with her late owner, Frida knows the value of money. She goes shopping for them all every day, taking one bank note at a time. The kind grocer thinks Frida shops for her humans, and pretty amused with this canine customer.

🐴 Soon Paras and Frida were joined by an old raven, and the three live quite harmoniously within the garden of Champ de Mars. A dog and a raven are common sights in Paris, but what about a horse? Well, people nowadays are more interested in their own businesses or smartphones, no one would have seen unusual things about the garden. Moreover, Paras takes her nap during the day and starts wandering around after dark.

🐴 But is Paras really unnoticed by any human being? The gardener found horse manure around some corners, so he knew there's a horse, but never actually saw it. During one of Paras' evening excursion, she found a young woman called Anaís who works at night for a patisserie. She often feeds Paras, so Anaís too knows about a horse loitering in Paris.

🐴 Finally there's an orphan little boy of about eight, who lives with his great grandmama. He "could" see Paras, and the two became inseparable best friends. I think moral of this story is that modern people have mostly lost the ability of being humane. They stick to their smartphones, tablets, social media, and forget what's more important of being human - love, friendship, and caring for others. The fact that none of these Parisians see a horse who share probably their daily jogging track is rather worrying. They most probably don't care either for their neighbors, friends, and so on. Some who do know about the three unlikely friends, and concern about them, are the happiest of all. They have a wholesome life as human being.

🐴 This is a book about Paris, but also about freedom, choices, and friendship. Jane Smiley did a great job to make me transported to Paris and vibes I had experienced more than twenty years ago (but I still remember very clearly to this day). I loved especially the animals interaction, with other animals and also with humans. It's a heartwarming story and the perfect book to start Paris in July this year!

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2

Read for:

Paris in July 2024

hosted by Emma @ Words and Peace

20 Books of Summer 2024
hosted by Cathy @ 746 Books