100 books like Three

This is one of the best books I have ever read. 

The writing is superb, the story clever and interesting and the settings diverse and beautiful. I love the characters and their inter and intra-family dynamics. And then there is a magical cat named Brie. 

The writing draws you into each scene and you feel like you are another person in the room as the story unfolds.     

Without Reservations gave me hope following the death of my beloved husband of 37 years. Living with his unique and nontraditional worldview, I’d grown into and inhabited a wider, less conventional way of being than my suburban middle-class upbringing had prepared me for. But once he was gone, what and who was I going to be? Steinbach’s travelogue goes to many of the places my husband and I traveled in England and Europe, and that brought reminiscences of great pleasure. But it was her inner journeying in search of her soul that gave me the courage to embark on the inner travels toward self-discovery and the independence I faced in a newly widowed existence.

I fell in love with this book so hard that I read it all in one sitting. (Yes, that means I spent one, entire, luxurious day reading it! That day was an absolute gift.) I loved the writing style, the chance to armchair travel to Paris on the back of Leo’s moped alongside Hannah. It had just enough intrigue but was quiet and charming overall. Reading this book was like taking my mind to a spa to be pampered and rejuvenated. 

This is the second of four books of the collected interviews of famous authors from the Paris Review. Hemingway, Moore, Porter, Ellison, and Huxley are among the fourteen included in this book. Other books in the series include Forster, Faulkner, Warren, Bellow, Welty, Dinesen, Steinbeck, and many others. You may be amazed at how different successful writers are in their thinking about writing and success in their careers. In my studies in over a hundred workshops and many lectures and seminars, I was fortunate to meet and know teachers and students who knew, or studied, with many of these authors. Experiences that make me think you’d value most of Plimpton’s work in this series.

Like so many, I’m addicted to this series. Often imitated, never surpassed, Simenon is perhaps the only mystery writer to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was considered by some contemporaries to be the greatest French novelist of his time. Don’t let that put you off. These are great mysteries with an indelible sense of time and place. If the Sherlock Holmes stories can transport me to Victorian London, I can as easily take an absorbing mid-20th century trip to the underside of Paris with Inspector Jules Maigret.

These police procedurals offer unforgettable characters and deep psychological insight. Maigret and the Bum is perhaps my favorite. The bum of the title is a vagrant who has been beaten nearly to death on the banks of the Seine. As Maigret investigates the crime, he finds that the victim was once a highly respected doctor, dedicated to helping the… show more.

This book is for those who love Paris or even just the dream of Paris. In this collection of fiction and non-fiction tales, a diverse group of writers take the reader to unexpected sides of the City of Lights, with a diverse array of experiences, from a romantic encounter to a heartbreaking mishap. In this enjoyable collection of tales, you can travel to Paris, if only for an evening.

We are coded as homo sapiens to look at each other. To observe, study, analyse our fellow creatures. One of the reasons I’ll never live in the country is that I’ll miss observing urban life. 

This is such a simple book with a simple premise. Perec recorded everything he saw while sitting at a café on a Parisian square over three days. When I lived in Paris in the 1990s, I had a dog-eared French version of this book and I dutifully went to the same place. Not to record my own observations but to try and see things that Perec might have seen twenty years prior.

A city-dweller regards their city. This book is at once nothing and yet it is everything about urban life. I found in Perec a comrade in arms. The romantic in me insists on believing that the seeds for my later urban observations lie… show more.

I bought this book during a weekend trip to Paris, and it turned out to be my favorite souvenir.

The author and illustrator are a husband and wife team, and they’ve cooked up a lovely character in Kylie, who is based on a real-life crocodile found once upon a time in the canals of Paris!

The much-loved English bookshop Shakespeare and Company can at times feel like a victim of its own success (every so often I try and imagine solutions as if I were trying to save Venice!), but the place remains a refuge for writers and readers and a true beacon of bohemian values.

In my first Makers book, owner Sylvia remembers her father George describing Paris: “where poetry is part of life; where men are poets and life is a poem.” And now the bookshop has published its own collection of poems about Paris, illustrated with beautiful line drawings by the Italian illustrator Matteo Pericoli.

Alongside verses by Rimbaud, Gregory Corso, or Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pericoli imagines the views from windows of poets who, at one time or another, made their homes here, like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas or Charles Baudelaire, or indeed Shakespeare and Company’s own beautiful view across the… show more.

While Poirier’s book covers the same period as Sebba’s, the mood is completely different. Her focus is on artists, with a cast that reads as your ultimate dinner-party guest wishlist: Juliette Gréco, Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Miles Davis... Such creators couldn’t help but salvage something from their war experiences, create a new world on their own terms. Poirier knows that history is made of people. And Paris is a rich source, for it’s a city that has attracted a multitude of movers and shakers for centuries. Poirier shows how such creators can produce much more than art, or a movement—they can mould an entire period. Poirier also knows that this personal telling of history makes reading it more enjoyable; her plotting is on point, her sprinkle of gossipy anecdotes just-so.