RidgewayGirl's Interrail Pass

Oh, this looks like fun. I think I'll do the same thing I'm doing for the Fifty States Challenge and read a fiction and a non-fiction book for each. I'll be here awhile.

I think I'll arrange things geographically, rather than alphabetically.



create your personalized map of europe

The Western Isles

England
Fiction: Mr. Timothy by Louis Bayard
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Greenland
Iceland
Fiction: Arctic Chill by Arnaldur Indridason

Ireland, Republic of
Fiction: The Dark Eye by Ingrid Black
Fiction: Haunted Ground by Erin Hart

Isle of Man
Northern Ireland
Scotland
Fiction: Gillespie and I by Jane Harris (2014)

Wales

Western Europe

Andorra
Belgium
Fiction: The Public Prosecutor by Jef Geeraerts (2017)

France
Fiction: 1914: A Novel by Jean Echenoz (2014)
Non-Fiction: Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik

Luxembourg
Fiction: The Expats by Chris Pavone

The Netherlands
Fiction: Back to the Coast by Saskia Noort (2014)
Non-Fiction: Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (2014)

Portugal
Fiction: Pereira Declares by Antonio Tabucci

Spain

Scandinavia and the Baltic Nations

Denmark
Estonia
Fiction: Purge by Sofi Oksanen

Finland
Fiction: Snow Angels by James Thompson

Latvia
Lithuania
Norway
Fiction: The Water's Edge by Karin Fossum
Non-Fiction: One of Us: Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Åsne Seierstad

Sweden
Fiction: Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman

Central Europe

Austria
Fiction: The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig (2014)

Czech Republic
Germany
Fiction: Stettin Station by David Downing
Non-Fiction: In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson (2014)

Hungary
Fiction: The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

Liechtenstein
Poland
Fiction: Briar Rose by Jane Yolen
Non-Fiction: Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (2014)
Image Before My Eyes by Lucjan Dobroszycki (2013)

Switzerland
Fiction: Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum

Eastern Europe and Eurasia

Albania
Armenia
Azjerbadjian
Belarus
Bosnia-Herzegovina
Bulgaria
Croatia
Fiction: Girl at War by Sara Novic

Georgia
Khazakhstan
Moldova
Montenegro
Romania
Russia
Fiction: The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Hall
Non-Fiction: The Angel of Grozny by Asne Seierstad

Serbia
Slovakia
Slovenia
Ukraine
Non-Fiction: Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (2014)

The Mediterranean Countries

Croatia
Cyprus
Greece
Fiction: Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (2015)

Italy
Fiction: A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell (2015)
Non-Fiction: The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr

Macedonia
Malta
Fiction: The Information Officer by Mark Mills

Monaco
Spain
Turkey

Great idea dividing into areas rather than just doing long lists. Welcome aboard!

it is a great idea ... hope you don't mind ridgewaygirl but I'm going to steal it if I may ...

See Alison, you're starting a trend!

Be my guest...

Well, I finished Portobello by Ruth Rendell, which was set in London, but I'm not counting that one as I have two other English books ready to go -- Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin, a forensic mystery set in medieval Cambridge, and Daphne, my Early Reviewer book, about Daphne Du Maurier and Branwell Bronte.

First, the disclaimer: my biggest pet peeve in historical fiction is when the characters behave and think like modern people, just dressed up in, say, tunics and riding horses, like an extra-authentic renaissance festival. People in the past not only wore different clothes and had bad teeth; they thought differently. Think about how attitudes toward homosexuality, the environment and race have changed in the past twenty years. Even worse, in my opinion, is when the author gives all the "bad guys" the mindset of the time, but the "good guys" are all modern liberals.

So I should have put down Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin after the first twenty pages. The protagonist, a forensic pathologist named Adelia, is not just a proto-feminist, but a full blown Feminist who could lecture Gloria Steinem on the evils of the male patriarchy. She is also shocked at witnessing antisemitism. In the twelfth century.

This book is full of the architecture and landscape of the fenlands and Cambridge. I'll count this as my England book, for now. What's difficult is that even though England is a relatively small country, it's large enough that it would be impossible to find a representative work. And I really don't want to start a "reading the shires of England" forum, which would lead to each country being sub-divided down until I would have thousands upon thousands of books to read.

Ha! "The read every public house and cottage in West Midlands Challenge".

Fun review of Mistress of the art of death! Made me giggle more than once. My wife liked that book a lot, as I recall. I'll need to run your opinions past her and see what she thinks. I seem to recall from my first days at LT stumbling over some thread discussing "book unfinished by the most LT:ers", and Franklin's book had a lot bidders...

>13 RidgewayGirl:, hear, hear!

Last year, I read Chlid 44 and loved it. The sequel, The Secret Speech, is newly released and has received mixed reviews. Happily, I liked this as much the first book, in ways more, since The Secret Speech relied much less heavily on coincidence, while retaining the elements of revenge and survival in the Soviet Union.

The Secret Speech refers to a speech given by Nikita Krushchev in which he is critical of Stalin's repressive tactics. Leo, the former secret policeman, has been given a small, secret homicide department. He's living his life as best he can, with his wife Raisa and the two girls they encountered in the first book. Things don't remain hopeful for long, though and the book takes us through Moscow's criminal underworld, the gulag and the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

While an important, but brief, section of the book takes place in Hungary, the setting and focus of the book are the Soviet Union. The gulag is located near Magadan, which is part of Russia, as is Moscow.

The Lost Painting is a fast-paced romp through Rome, Dublin, London and Edinburgh in the search of a lost painting by Caravaggio. The artist and art history are short-changed, but if you are interested in the competitive world of art historians, restorers and academics, this is an excellent peek at how reputations are made and lost.

Caravaggio was a paranoid nutbag who was forced to flee Rome when he killed a guy. Being a fugitive changed his personality only for the worse, but the guy could paint. Most of his paintings have been lost or destroyed over time and so the discovery of a new Caravaggio was enough to send the art world into a tizzy. This book had a limited scope, which allowed Harr to write a tightly plotted and exciting book about a fairly unexplosive topic.

The action centers around Rome, where Caravaggio painted The Taking of Christ and where the first hints that the painting may still exist arise. Locations in Rome are mentioned frequently and I used a map to keep track of the action, which occurred mostly in the neighborhood of the Pantheon.

I noticed that you haven't included Romania on your list. Any particular reason or was it just a slip?

Thanks for catching that! I've repaired the omission. Imagine my disappointment on thinking I'd finished the challenge (estimated to be sometime in 2014) only to be told I'd missed one.

The Information Officer by Mark Mills is a wartime thriller in the style of Alan Furst. Taking place on the Mediterranean island of Malta during the fierce bombing raids of 1942, the story follows Max Chadwick, in charge of presenting a British view of events to the inhabitants, and his actions after he learns that someone, probably British, is murdering young Maltese women. The story is fast paced and well plotted, if implausible. Malta's part of the Second World War that is not that well known, at least here in the United States and the presentation of its history and role in the war was well done and not intrusive. I enjoyed this book, and hope that Mills continues to explore the era.

There was a great deal of description of the island and its history. I feel a bit relieved to have finally read something set in one of the less well covered countries!

I visited Malta in my teens, and was really intrigued by this island and it's complex history. Not least during WW2. I was told more bombs were dropped on Malta during 1942 than on London during the whole war. Which says a lot...

The Dark Eye is the second in a series of dark mysteries featuring ex-FBI agent Saxon, who left the agency, wrote a bridge-burning account of her time there and moved to Dublin where she's at loose ends. She's supposed to be writing, but she'd much rather use her connections (her lover is head of Dublin's homicide squad) to investigate things on her own. So when a man phones her to say that someone is trying to kill him and asks her to meet with him out at Howth's lighthouse, she agrees and is given a convoluted mystery to occupy herself with. Along the way, she tangles with a serial killer, the art establishment and a bunch of seriously disturbed individuals. The ending is dramatic, but somewhat diluted by the need to explain things afterward.

This book is part of a series, but it stands alone well enough. It gives a bleak and somewhat hopeless version of Dublin. Saxon is a prickly and difficult character, somewhat reminicent of early Kay Scarpetta. She's interesting and opinionated, and not always able to control her tongue. She has a distinctly right wing view of justice, but there are plenty of more balanced characters to balance things out.

Dublin and Howth are well described in this book, with a lot of attention given to what it means to be a non-native in Ireland.

#22 I can't decide if this book sounds good or not. Did you like it? Do you recommend it? I like that it is a good picture of Ireland.

I didn't like it as much as the first book, The Dead (no touchstone for that one). This one has a bit of the feel of a series settling in. I did enjoy it, but it wasn't some great, exciting discovery. I will read the next in the series, The Judas Heart, and I am happy to have found a dark mystery series I enjoy.

#24 My library only has "The Dead", not either of the other 2 books. I'm going to give it a try, but then I'll have to hunt a bit for the next two book if I love it!

My Early Reviewer book this month was fortuitously set in Finland. It's a dark mystery/thriller written by an American but set in a small skiing town a hundred miles north of the Arctic circle during the cold winter darkness. Kari Vaara is in charge of a small police station when the mutilated body of a Somali film actress is found on a reindeer farm in his jurisdiction. Suspicion quickly falls on her Finnish lover who, coincidentally, is also the man his ex-wife left him for some thirteen years earlier.

Thompson has lived in Finland and describes the land and culture with an outsider's eye, which is to say, he is attuned to what is unusual and noteworthy. He uses Vaara's wife, an American, to voice criticism of Finnish culture, a touch that felt very real to me. Unfortunately, Vaara himself sounded American in places, Finnish in others. That quibble aside, this book has a wealth of details about life in Finland, from offshoot religious groups to the importance of alcohol in daily life.

That said, the mystery itself defied reason. It had its moments, but didn't hold together, especially the unbelievable ending. This was clearly a debut novel, but Thompson shows signs of being able to develop an interesting series, he just isn't there yet.

#26 This books sounds really interesting, RidgewayGirl. What's it called?

Edit: Never mind. I found it on your other thread. Snow Angels by James Thompson. I've added it to the wishlist. Nice review.

Ha. Thanks, sjmccreary. I put everything except the freakin' title in that review. I may have to request fresh brains for Christmas.

I'm replacing my lackluster England book with Mr. Timothy by Louis Bayard, a Dickensian Christmas tale. Tiny Tim has grown up and, thanks to the benevolent help of his Uncle N, is left with only an uncomfortable limp to remind him of his crippled childhood. He hasn't fulfilled expectations, however, neither his own or that of others, living as he is as a tutor of a sorts in a brothel and depending even now on handouts from his uncle. He is haunted by his father, a man he seeks to understand, and now by the memory of a dead girl found in an alley. As he seeks to find out what has happened to her and the others he finds, a dark tale emerges, complete with characters that Dickens would be proud of, all existing in the dangerous, impoverished world of Victorian London during the Christmas season.

I adored this book and found it the perfect holiday read. The London depicted was vivid, cold and colorful.

That sounds really great! Something Flea (my wife) would love, no doubt. I'm making a note of it. Thanks for another really good mini review!

My first book of the year has been living with me for some time. It's the first in a mystery series, each set in a different arrondisement of Paris. Murder in the Marais by Cara Black has a lackluster and completely improbable plot and main character which seem based on too many viewings of La Femme Nikita, an excellent movie (the original one), but maybe not the best basis for an entire novel. However, the real star of this book is the city of Paris, which Black describes in infinite and authentic detail. The story takes place in 1993, and Black includes details of France's now defunct Minitel system and the now rarer reek of Galoise cigarettes. So, if you can ignore plot and characterization, and read it solely for the setting, this book is excellent. I will give Black another chance or two, simply because of, well, Paris.

Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman is a crime novel by a Swedish author, but it's much more than just another dark Scandinavian mystery. The novel centers around a double murder, following the lives of three people affected by the event; the young woman who stumbles across the bodies, a doctor whose wife is in the area at the time, and a teenage boy who runs away the night of the killings. For much of the novel, as the characters go about living their lives, the murders are almost forgotten. Ekman explores the themes of solitude and loneliness, how you can live with someone and still be a stranger to them, environmental destruction and the uncomfortable tension between a nostalgia for days gone by and the harsh reality of life in the middle of Sweden in the past.

The writing is beautiful with lovely descriptions of a part of Sweden between Ostersund and Norway, where nature is lush and fragile, the people hardy but closed to outsiders. The mystery is solved in the end, in a satisfying way. A book well worth reading.

Vienna Secrets is the fourth book in a mystery series set in fin-de-siecle Vienna featuring Max Liebermann, a Jewish Psychologist and Oskar Rheinhardt, a police inspector.

A decapitated body of a well-loved priest is found next to a plague column in the center of Vienna. The head was seemingly removed by sheer force, yet there are few indications that the victim resisted what had to have been a particularly brutal way to die. Rheinhardt and Liebermann search for the murderer even as more bodies are found and the clues lead Liebermann into Jewish mysticism, an area of study he, as a modern Viennese Jew, had never encountered.

I had not read any of the previous books, but happily don't think that it affected my enjoyment of this book. For enjoy it I did, the setting is magnificent and Tallis draws a stunning picture of Vienna in its heyday.
The characters are all firmly a part of the time the book takes place, but remain sympathetic and multi-faceted all the same. The mystery was suitably mysterious and well plotted.

Again: sounds very interesting! When is it set?

The book is set at the turn of the last century, a time when Vienna was a vibrant cultural centre and Sigmund Freud was developing his influential ideas of the psyche.

The doctor, Liebermann, believes that things are improving for Jews in Europe, and that the era of pogroms is ending. I like that the main character is not at all prescient. I think if I lived back then, as a member of the professional class, my views would be equally optimistically wrong.

My book for Scotland, One Good Turn, takes place in Edinburgh during the Festival. Jackson Brodie, the detective of Case Histories, is there to be with his actress girlfriend, who is busy preparing for a play to show during the Festival. While waiting in line for a show he witnesses a brutal attack set off by a minor traffic incident. From there the story takes off, following various witnesses, the victim of the attack, his rescuer and a police inspector. Atkinson draws their lives apart and then back together in a well plotted story. Atkinson's strength is in her characters and her ability to create complex and fascinating characters. She also writes beautifully, with compassion and humor, that shines through on every page of this excellent novel.

I read Atkinson's first books, but lost her somewhere after Emotionally weird when she stopped being translated into Swedish, it seems. When did she take up detective stories?

It's fairly recent; her last three books have all followed the character of Jackson Brodie, although he can't really be called the main character in any of the three books. They are all considered literary mysteries, whatever that means. The first two, Case Histories and One Good Turn were seriously excellent.

I've never understood that literary mystery tag either but she was brave to switch genre and write under her own name, others who write 'literary fiction' such as John Banville use a completely different name for their detective books. I too like Atkinson's Brodie books but my favourite of her books still remains her earlier Behind the Scenes at the Museum

@38-39 Actually saw One good turn today, in a really good-looking edition. Might need to check that out!

Briar Rose takes place in the USA, Germany and Poland, but the focus is very much on Poland and the chapters set there are evocative of both Poland during the black days of the Second World War and during the hopeful days of the early 1990s.

I had thought to include The Angel of Grozny by Asne Seierstad under Chechnya, but then realized that if I counted Chechnya as its own country, I'd have to find books for all the other Russian Republics and there are dozens. Also, any suggestions for Dagestan, North Ossetia or Adygea? There are twenty-one republics. So The Angel of Grozny becomes my non-fiction book for Russia.

I don't think that I've ever read a book that has made me so aware about how little I know. I'm a bit of a news junkie, so I'd read whatever showed up in the papers about Chechnya, but that didn't even touch what is going on now and what has happened in Chechnya's bloody past. For example, did you know that Stalin deported the whole damn country to Khazakhstan? A half million mountain people were sent to live on the plains of Khazakhstan with no means of support. Twenty-five percent died on the journey or in the first few months.

Seierstad wrote The Bookseller of Kabul, in which she lived with a family in Afghanistan. The Angel of Grozny is much more far-reaching in scope. She first went to Chechnya during the first Chechen war soon after she'd gotten a job working for a Norwegian newspaper as the correspondent for Russia, based entirely on her knowledge of Russian. She talked herself onto a Russian military plane and was dropped off at the Grozny airport. She chose to trust people and, in turn, random people invited her into their homes and told their stories.

Seierstad must be an easy person to talk to. She speaks with everyone from the leader of Chechnya to orphaned children, disabled Russian veterans and a man who killed his sister in an honor killing. This was not an easy book to read; the violence in Chechnya has no easy solutions, nor even difficult ones. Were the Russians to leave, civil war would erupt, the Chechens themselves divided between traditional Muslims and the more extreme Wahabists, as well as divisions along tribal lines.

41 Sounds fascinating! Seierstad has tended to annoy me a little bit as a media persona, so I gave The bookseller of Kabul a miss. But this sounds like a great book on a region I, too, know way too little about. Great review!

Hi RidgewayGirl,

I loved reading your thread - but I've just bought not one but TWO copies of Mistress of the Art of Death (an accident) from Book Depository. Now I'm going to giggle whenever she acts like a staunch 21st century liberal.

I'm adding The Angel of Grozny to my wishlist. I didn't read the Bookseller of Kabul because I remember some fuss at the time about whether she was honest with the family, or something like that (I haven't checked whether that's the right story, and I haven't had my coffee yet so I might be totally wrong). But this one sounds really good.

For Norway, I read a book by Karin Fossum called The Water's Edge. This is one of a series of police procedurals featuring Sejer, a world-weary yet compassionate detective. If that sounds like the protagonist of many a mystery novel, it is, but the series is well done, and the Norwegian setting is interesting. In this installment, a boy's sexually abused body is found in the woods near a lake by a married couple. The wife is unhappy with her partner's reaction to their find; he takes pictures of the corpse on his cell phone and discusses calling the tabloids.

Sejer and his younger partner Skarre set out to find the murderer, which is not as easy as it seems. Fossum also uses the opportunity to explore Norwegian society's reactions to pedophilia and other behaviors outside the norm. This is a short book, but one that leaves plenty to think about.

No, no, stop, don't give me another Scandinavian thriller series to find! I have umpteen unread Mankells on the bookshelf after I read Dogs of Riga and couldn't stop till 2 or 3 in the morning, and I also really liked one by Arnaldur Indridasson (I think) set in Finland.

Ah, but Henning Mankell is Swedish and Arnaldur Indridasson is, I think, Icelandic. You have an opening for a good Norwegian series.

@47 RidgewayGirl is right. Now you just got to add a Dane and a Finn to get a full house!

I'm adding a second book for Ireland, Haunted Ground by Erin Hart. As a mystery, it was average, but the author so beautifully described rural Ireland - the story takes place in an untouristed area on the banks of Lough Derg on the eastern edge of Co. Galway - from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the village, to the world of Irish musicians, that it was worth reading for that. A bit of the history of Ireland is also explored; the upheaval and destruction of Cromwell's rule there.

The sign of a good series is that a new reader can pick up the latest one and not feel lost, while the faithful reader is not bored with long descriptions of events he has already witnessed. Stettin Station by David Downing is the third in a series of four books (so far) and I found it excellent, despite having never read the previous books.

Historical fiction, and especially stories that take place in Hitler's Europe as this one does, often fall prey to several common pitfalls. One, the protagonist understands the long-term implications of current events or predicts with startling accuracy what will happen next. Another is the cardboard Nazi. People can be nuanced and complex creatures until they join the Nazi Party and become EEEEEVIL. And, finally, the tremendously noble hero. In contemporary thrillers the protagonist can be flawed, but when it comes to WWII, the main character is often altruistic to the point of idiocy, and that the author allows them to save beautiful Jewish girls from rapacious SS Officers on a regular basis while carrying important secret documents.

Happily, Downing avoids all that. John Russell is an American of convenience, his British passport would no longer allow him to live and work in the Berlin of 1941. His connections and political sympathies lie far to the left and his only concern is getting his son, girlfriend and himself through the war and he's willing to do business with Nazis and to avoid helping the Americans to do so. He's not without principle and is trying to discover where the train loads of Jewish Berliners are going, but knowing who to trust and who is compromised is an impossible task.

Downing weaves a complex story of conflicted loyalties in a vividly rendered wartime Berlin. I'm looking forward to reading the other books in this excellent series.

Thanks to JustJoey4 and GingerbreadMan, I picked up Purge by Sofi Oksanen, a novel set in Estonia between 1939 and 1992. The novel follows two women, Aliide, who has lived in a small village in western Estonia all her life, and Zara, a young woman from Vladivostok, Russia who nonetheless speaks Estonian. It's hard to briefly sum up this book since so much is going on. Estonia was swept over by the Soviets, then the Germans, then the Soviets again and then finally achieved independence, but not without still being subject to corruption and criminal gangs. Surviving required a great deal of dexterity and resilience, when family members were called to inform on each other and everybody had secrets.

This novel is very well done and certainly deserved all the awards showered on its author in Finland. Zara meets Aliide when she is found huddled in her yard one morning. Aliide eventually allows her inside, with much suspicion on both sides. There's much unsaid between the women, who have a connection that neither can openly acknowledge. Aliide is old and fighting to get her land back. Her story is told alongside the story of Aliide and Zara's current story. Both women have gone through terrible things, neither remaining innocent or blameless themselves. Oksanen vividly depicted how the victim of an atrocity then sees the world. There's not a misstep along the entirety of this book. It's not always an easy novel to read, but it was always compelling.

I have a great fondness for noirish crime novels set in the north, so when I snagged Arctic Chill by Arnaldur Indridason from the Early Reviewers program I was enormously pleased. Indridason is an Icelandic author and this book, one of a series of police procedurals, is set in Reykjavik in the winter. In Arctic Chill, the body of a boy is found near the apartment building in which he and his mother and brother live. His mother is Thai and although his father is Icelandic, the suspicion of the police is that this was a racially motivated murder.

The investigation is led by the dour and unfriendly Erlender, a man who is less lonely and wounded than asocial. He's an interesting variation on the usual loner detective and although his behavior is partially explained by events in his childhood, he is an unpleasant guy. He is haunted by an earlier missing woman case and can't let it go.

The novel's setting is an integral part of the story and, in the course of the investigation, Indridason explores the impact of immigrants, primarily from Asia, on the small Icelandic population. In comparison to events in the United States (where I am) the racism is mild and calmly addressed, but what really struck me about Indridason's Iceland is the isolation in which people choose to live. Marriages break up with very little thought and children are abandoned by their fathers who leave without having to support their offspring in any way and people live next to neighbors they never get to know. All this is amplified by the early dark and relentless cold of the Icelandic winter.

Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists revolves around an international newspaper based in Rome. Each chapter is a story about a member of staff, with another story about the founder of the paper set in pieces throughout the book. The newspaper is losing money and has done for years, even as it refuses to modernize in any substantial way and it's filled with a motley group of ex-pats and malcontents.

The Imperfectionists is cleverly written, so much so that I had to reread occasional paragraphs, just to enjoy the use of language. Each story, no matter how light and subtly humorous it is, has a melancholic edge. I was sorry when I had finished this book and look forward to seeing what Rachman does next.

The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer tells the story of Andras Levi, a Hungarian student who goes to study architecture in Paris in 1937, because restrictions have been enacted in his homeland preventing more than a small percentage of Jews from getting a higher education, and follows him and his family over to subsequent decade.

This is an old-fashioned kind of historical novel, not "literary" in any way, unconcerned with the actions of prominent people, but focusing on a single family across a decade of war and upheaval. Hungarian Jews were protected in a way most of Europe's other Jews were not; Hungary was allied with the Germans for much of the war and its government kept the local Jews from the camps. They were subject to restrictive laws and the men were sent to work in labor brigades, where many died, but it was not until Germans occupied Hungary late in the war that the Jews were segregated into ghettos and then deported. So while The Invisible Bridge is the story of a Jewish family in Europe during the Second World War, it's not a story of death camps or going into hiding.

There's a great deal here about life in Hungary, especially in Budapest and I learned a great deal about Hungary's unique history during WWII.

Both fiction and nonfiction? That's ambitious!

You've rekindled my interest in Stettin Street Station; it's been on my TBR list for ages. And it seems like Nordic crime/noir is all the rage right now - Indridason, Jo Nesbø, Karin Fossum. I haven't read any of these authors, but I'm certainly interested.

There are travel memoirs that become classics. While they take place at a particular time, they either manage to grasp what is eternal about a place or they perfectly capture a lost version of the place they're writing about. Down and Out in Paris and London captures the eternal of being poor in a great place, I think, and A Moveable Feast is a snapshot of a great time that is gone and still mourned.

Adam Gopnik's account of a American family living in Paris for five years, Paris to the Moon, falls into a second category; a book that is a snapshot of a time and a place, but one that is rapidly fading and which will be forgotten in a few more years. It's a very specific memoir, full of a young father's infatuation with his son, and it's the story of a specific family (well-to-do New Yorkers writing for The New Yorker) in a specific place (Paris, circa 1995).

Which is not to say that this is not a highly readable book. It is. But I suspect that my enjoyment of it is based on the similarities of our experiences. I lived in Paris for a year and we started our family in a European country and watched our children being not altogether American. So much of what I liked about Paris to the Moon were the parts where our experiences overlapped. Gopnik interviewed Bernard-Henri Levy; I had a crush on Levy when I lived in Paris (I was taken with the idea that a philosopher could be a sex-symbol). Gopnik's wife had their second child in Paris; I had my two children in Munich, and found Gopnik's experience to be similar to my own. My time in Paris occurred just a few years before Gopnik's, so that I recognized his version of Paris more readily than I do Paris of today.

There are pieces of this book that are very, very good. The chapter on the trial and surrounding media storm of a French public official charged with war crimes was excellent and a brief segment on the French interviewee's astonishment over being called by fact-checkers was funny and thought-provoking.

There is simply a lot of this book that is specific to Gopnik's own experiences and which doesn't expand to universality. His search for an American-style place to work out, for example, or the long story of his son's first crush at age five. And while the reader gets an painstaking account of the bedtime story Gopnik told his son, complete with his son's trenchant commentary, there is almost nothing about his wife or how the move affected their relationship.

I loved this book, but I think that I loved it because of the memories it brought back, more than for the writing itself.

It's been almost a year and a half, but I'm bringing this thing back. Time to get reading!

Glad to see you back. I've finished the challenge but still lurk here to get ideas.

And, I'm back again. I've updated my map and I'm determined to get moving!

More determination! Reviving your thread.

Thanks, Pam! I'm reading a book by a Belgian author now. . .

I'll look forward to reading along with your continuing journeys.

I've added a country to my count - Belgium, with The Public Prosecutor by Jef Geeraerts. Review to come.