etc.

I woke up this morning, made myself a cup of tea, slipped in an Edith Piaf CD and settled into reading this lovely little book. While it is sometimes difficult to distinguish your enjoyment of a particular book from the expericence of reading it, I’d have to say this is the kind of book that I would have enjoyed even on a rushed commute. White writes Paris so intimately and passionately, and that intimacy and passion is heightened by the fact that his partner, Hubert Sorin, illustrated White’s anecdotal sketches of Paris with old-fashioned, caricatures of the characters that people this work, from their exhuberant concierge, to the Parisian street singers and grocers. White’s memories of Paris centre around their friends and acquaintances, and there is a whole lot of literary name-dropping in many of the comical episodes here, but there is also an underlying sadness to this book because the task of completing the work was constrained by the limitations of Sorin’s illness – he was dying of AIDS as he worked to complete his illustrations. Without White’s tender Afterword, the book might have seemed a pointless patchwork of disjointed narratives, but it manages to put the rest of the work in context and celebrates the impact on his life of both a remarkable man and a remarkable city.