100 books like The French Art of Living Well

In Henry James’ masterpiece from 1901, Lambert Strether, aged 55, is a Boston Puritan who hasn’t lived. He travels to Paris on an ambassadorial mission.

From the moment of arrival in Paris he is beguiled and intrigued, but unclear what to do. He proceeds to meander through gilded French drawing rooms in which high aesthetic taste of both manner and décor presides. This quiet and modest outsider eventually fills out into the man who runs the show.

Strether has discovered what to know, who to choose, and when to move. Everything depends on it. The method must be learnt in the thick of lived life along the way.

Here is evidence of the existence of a god within, a wisdom of soul with a coherent vision of what matters, one that slyly directs the focus of the person walking confusedly in the world, leading them to move with discrimination.

While every one of Sedaris’ books is hilarious, this one is later in his life and reflects in a very deep way on a life well-lived.

While living in France, he talks about the experience of being an expat and has a lot of funny stories interacting with locals as he stowed away in his home there to both write and relax.

I love Stein’s unapologetic and brazen queerness at a time when that was not exactly appreciated. Toklas was Stein’s lifelong lover, with whom she shared her life in Paris.

To me, this book feels like a love letter. My favorite scene is the one in which Toklas and Stein invite the struggling artists of Paris to dinner and then sit them opposite paintings they themselves have made in order to keep them from arguing. Stein’s wit is as lively as ever in this book, and–it’s simply the best example of a hoax autobiography I can think of. And it certainly puts paid to any notion that an autobiographical text might be stable or even a little truthy.

Words do marvelous things as they emerge out of Stein’s brilliant mind. 

I am in love with Paris. I went there once for work. I was there for four days and gained eight pounds. The pastries, the chocolate, the bread, the wine. Oh, the endless butter and sugar. So, a romance set in a Parisian Chocolaterie? I’m all in. There’s also a seduction set whilst walking up a staircase that’s the sexiest thing I have ever read and it’s not even close. 

Slyvain Marquis is every woman’s dream in that he woos them with chocolate. The descriptions of the flavors, textures, and smells are transporting. I’m so sad that a real box of his chocolates will never exist in the real world.

In grad school, Adam and I had the same advisor, McArthur ‘Genius’ Kirk Varnedoe, and as a lifelong New Yorker reader, I’ve avidly followed his career. Paris to the Moon is an engaging memoir of his family and professional life as an ex-pat New Yorker writer in Paris during the 1990s. I love his insider-outsider perspective and the fact that he lived in my favorite neighborhood, rive Gauche at the boundary between the 6th and 7th arrondissements. With a sociologist-anthropologist’s eye, Adam interrogates the quintessentially Parisian (why Café Flore has surpassed Deux Magots in fashionability, for instance), attends lectures by celebrity sociologist Jean Beaudrillard, muses about the public reception of labor strikes, negotiates toddler culture in Paris, and take us food exploring with the iconic Alice Waters.

I'm not sure the 1957 movie version of Hemingway's 1926 first novel, with terrific performances by Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner, and Errol Flynn, is a great movie, but when I first saw it on my old black and white TV in the early sixties, I was so deeply affected. I had to immediately read the book.

Hemingway, was, of course, himself an expatriate American in Paris in the 1920s. What I love about the book is Hemingway's ability to capture the atmosphere of the time and place, as his Lost Generation characters booze, fight, love, and perhaps try to come to terms with the life they have created for themselves. Then there is that impossible love story between war-injured Jake and Brett!

Everyone knows that there are no “French people.” Each region has its particular culture, and Paris is a country unto itself. Focusing on one particular artisan, his clients, and his neighborhood, Carhart helps us to understand what it means to inhabit a single quartier of Paris. It’s one of the most beautiful memoirs I’ve ever read – and I don’t even play the piano!

This book has everything you want from a gripping historical novel – a pacy dual timeline plot which races along at breakneck speed featuring badass female spies, despicable villains, and moments of pure heartbreak, and it’s based on a true story.

I’m a sucker for an unlikely friendship and the one which develops between veteran spy Eve and young Charlie as they embark on a mission to find Charlie’s missing cousin, is a particularly special one. There’s a reason why Kate Quinn is one of the queens of this genre.

Despite a keen interest in Paris, its history and arts, reading straight history books isn’t my thing.

I prefer to learn by reading narrative nonfiction that draws on historical events as does McCullough’s. He focuses on the period in Paris (1830-1900) when the City of Light was the center of culture, the time when American artists, doctors, writers, musicians, and politicians among others ventured across the Atlantic to gain inspiration and knowledge from living in Paris.

McCullough highlights stories of the famous such as Mary Cassatt, Samuel Morse, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Oliver Wendell Holmes, as well as lesser-known folks, interweaving their lives with historical events. One surprise was how American physicians benefited greatly from their Parisian colleagues. Other remarkable accounts await you.

I love novels that pluck figures from the sidelines of history and place them up-front-and-center. In this case, the figure is the real-life Vietnamese-born man who served as Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’ cook in Paris. Full of atmospheric detail, the writing in this novel is absolutely exquisite. I felt immersed in 1930s Paris, a world that’s long entranced me, but I was seeing it from an entirely new perspective. Truong offers tantalizing glimpses of Bihn’s life in the Stein-Toklas household, but the most memorable scenes happen when he’s alone, walking through the streets of Paris, on his way to meeting a lover, or regaling us with stories of his childhood in Vietnam and his fraught but tender love for his father. It’s a beautiful tale of exile and homecoming.