To me, summer is a time of traveling. If traveling is not possible, the next best thing is being an armchair traveller. With some nice champagne (Orangina and Fanta, two European drinks that are good too), curling up and reading these books is almost as good as trekking around Sardinia or Thailand.

“This was Marianne, the revolutionary heroine, the French equivalent of Uncle Sam. This being France, instead of a bearded old uncle who looks as if he should be advertising fried chicken, they have a seminaked woman”.

Hilarious account of Paul West’s escapades in France for a year. Includes cultural confusion, french nightclubs, crazy bosses and sexy french women.

The numerous follow-up books are just as humorous and fun.

“Our architect, an expatriate Parisian, had warned us that building in Provence was very
similar to trench warfare, with long periods of boredom interrupted by bursts of
violent and noisy activity”

The Provence collection of books from Peter Mayle is definitely a series for food and sun lovers. The rich descriptions of the good life in the South of France from the author of A Good Year are worth reading.

For the gourmets reading this, one of the books in particular, French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork and Corkscrew, will definitely have you laughing and drooling, so make sure you have some pâté and baguette around.

If you recently enjoyed “Coraline”, the newly released 2009 animated stop-motion 3D fantasy movie, you may like to explore the story further in a different media, the graphic novel. You will discover why Neil Gaiman’s story works so well as a graphic novel, as he often uses a child’s perspective in his fantasy world. Some of his early works were written as comic books. Neil has a gift for describing something that most of us as adults have forgotten: how strange the world we live in looks to children.

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