Books

Had time to read some books during the holiday season

Stephen Clark: A Year in the Merde

Paul West arrives in Paris to start a new job - and finds out what the French are really like.

Quite a funny book

Apparently moving to Paris is just like how it was moving to Budapest in the '90's

- loads of byrocrasy, paper work & stamps

.

'Bernard smiled nervously and began.

"Yam bare narr, yam responsa bull ov communikasyon, er..."

Shit, I thought, didn't Jean-Marie say the meeting was going to be in English?

How come some people were allowed to speak Hungarian?"

...

Emma Burstall: Gym and Slimline

Fanny & warm book

about friendship of 4 women aged around 40 who'd met in a new gym 4 years ago

in leafy south-west London.

It's about relationships, children, work, personal issues...

.

- the author Emma Burstall writes for newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, Independent on Sunday, Woman & Home and Woman.

She studied English at Cambridge University and lives in London with her husband and their 3 children

...

Wendy Wasserstein: Elements of Style

This book is a sort of American version of the previous book.

(read it 2 years earlier, just wanted to mention it now)

.

It's about New York's urban gentry living in a post-9/11 world

- the arbiters of fashion and the doyennes of charity balls; about the rich and the nouveau rich, the glamorous and the desperate to be

- mosaic of the social lives of Manhattan

- romance, work, family and friendship

.

Wendy Wasserstein is the author of the plays Uncomon Women and Others, Isn't It Romantic, The Sisters Rosenweig, An American Daughter, and The Heidi Chronicle, for which she received a Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize.