My Favorites

I loved this graphic memoir which chronicles the author’s youth in a town in Pennsylvania where her father was a teacher, but also ran his family’s funeral home (which his kids called the Fun Home). I think it could inspire anyone who had any gift at all for drawing to try something similar. She doesn’t have to go on at length about things: so much is conveyed in the drawing!

7 CDs. The third in Bragg's family trilogy, and I loved them all. Bragg writes “With this book I close the circle of family stories in which my father occupied only a few pages, but lived between every line.”

All on one CD, read by the author. I had known nothing of Alice’s career. She and her friend Mina Shaughnessy spearheaded the Open Admissions program at City College of NY, one of the early adopters of OA. Alice and Mina were passionate about the whole idea of Open Admissions, which is interesting to me, since I think it is such a bad idea. Alice was an optimist. (You’d have to be, to believe in Open Admissions.) But, all of that is beside the point. This slim book is a portrait of Calvin and Alice’s marriage. The book is not about the facts, but here are some facts: They married in 1965, and she survived lung cancer in 1976 (her parents smoked). She had another 25 good years, but eventually died young (at age 63) from the delayed effects of the radiation treatment.

Wesley the Owl, by Stacey O'Brien © 2008
7 hours, on CD. In her early 20s, Stacey was working as a biologist at Cal Tech. Some hikers had found a 3-day-old barn owl and brought it in. It had some nerve damage in one wing, and needed to be adopted. Stacey took him home, and this is the story of their 19-year relationship. Talk about bonding! Wesley could always hear her, whenever she came into the house, and would call out a greeting to her. If he thought she was sleeping too long, he would lift up one of her eyelids with his beak. He tried to feed her mice. (Thanks to Marie, for this recommendation.)

3 cassettes, read by the author. Won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize. I loved this; in particular I love the way she captures the dialogue. Hearing Eudora read this story almost brought Ruth Ireland back to life. (Ruth was our wonderful neigh-bor when we lived on Stone Lick in Gilmer Co, West Virginia.)

{Bob read this on paper c. 2000}

9.75 hours, on CD. The author is an Irish playwright, novelist, and poet. The Secret Scripture was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008, but lost to Adiga’s The White Tiger. It tells the life story of 100 year old Roseanne Clear, incarcerated for most of her adult life in Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital. I have no idea why this book was titled as it was. The narrative is divided between “Roseanne’s testimony of herself,” and the journal kept by her psychiatrist Dr Grene as he investigates her past.

Just Kids, by Patti Smith © 2010
When Robert Mapplethorpe was dying (in 1989), Patti Smith asked what she could do for him. He asked her to write their story. This book was how she "kept that vow to him." They spent their 20s together. They were both born in 1946.

One thing I found frustrating was that, when she talked about their many friends and acquaintances, she failed to successfully draw a picture of them in the reader's mind. So, when she'd mention the person again, I was left thinking, "who was that again?"

After finishing the book, I enjoyed watching many YouTube clips, including three interviews that Charlie Rose had with Patti.

{Bob skimmed this; still puzzled about the protaganists; worth reading for the patron-client story (Sam Wagstaff).}

Second Tier

9 CDs. I never (thankfully) knew much about meth addiction before reading this account. Meth is the fastest-growing drug in the U.S., as well as the most addictive and most dangerous. The ‘beautiful boy’ of the title, Nic, was born in 1983 and grew up in Marin County. He says later about his attempts at recovery, "I didn’t know what was wrong with me, and I also felt really hopeless, like, “Well, it’s working for these people, it’s not working for me, so I’m screwed; I guess I’ll just drink and use until I die.” Back then, when I was sober, I was in so much pain—even more pain than when I was using."

5.5 hours, on CD. Loved this. The author looks back on the tumultuous fights of her first marriage, the marriage counseling, and the moment of awakening, when everything changed, and she came to be at peace with her marriage. Then, tragically, she is widowed, and raises her four children alone (for awhile).

2 hours, on 2 CDs. These stories have received much acclaim. ‘The Shawl’ was first published in The New Yorker in 1981, and ‘Rosa,’ a longer companion piece, was published there three years later. Both were included in the annual Best American Short Stories and awarded First Prize in the annual O. Henry Prize Stories collection. “The Shawl” finds Rosa Lublin in a concentration camp with her baby Magda and her niece Stella. The second story, “Rosa,” takes up the thread thirty years later, in a Miami residence hotel. A question I ponder is, is it possible for people to control their frame of reference? If you find the term “survivor” dehumanizing, as Rosa did, can you “decide” to have it be a term that makes you proud?

I picked up a free paperback copy of this book and it was a quick read. The descriptions of Grogan’s dog Marley did cause me to chuckle out loud a few times. The strong bond that one forms with one’s dog is amazing—one comes to accept behavior and routines that an outsider can only shake one’s head over!

Not To My Taste

10 hours, on CD. Eva gave me this book, after having read it with her book group. Both of us had liked an earlier book by Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger. However, I didn't find this one (her 16th) particularly worth reading. Alison Harper lives with her husband Charles at Allersmead, a suburban Edwardian villa they had purchased when first married. In the 1970s and 80s, with the live-in help of Ingrid, they (mostly Alison and Ingrid) raised their six children. Now the children are grown and scattered (except for Paul), and returning for visits with boyfriends and spouses. All about the importance of Family, to Alison, and her version (memory; story told to self) of what life had been like, vs. each child's version.

8.75 hours, on CD. A Moe Prager Mystery. The action of the book took place in 1978, told from a 1998 perspective. In 1998, a dying man calls Moe to his bedside and Moe finally gets closure on what happened to Patrick Maloney, who disappeared in 1978. So far so good, except for the whole “I was being used” thing, which drove a lot of the action, and which I didn’t really get. Then there is the Epilogue. The narrator, Moe, fills in the reader on all the minor characters in the book (several of whom I had already forgotten from only two days before). The Epilogue could have been (better) written by the St. Brides’ student who wrote our 8^th grade Class Prophecy. “Rico got his shield and actually made the big case he was working….His wife left him, of course….One day I was watching a special on VH1 about New York’s early punk scene and there’s Nicky being interviewed.”

5 cassettes. Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was born Ford Hermann Hueffer, but changed his name at age 46 in honor of his grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. He is best remembered for this book (and he published over 50 books!). According to Wikipedia: The Good Soldier is frequently included among the great literature of the past century, including the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, The Observer's '100 Greatest Novels of All Time,' and The Guardian's '1000 novels everyone must read.' Really? I’m sorry to say this novel did nothing for me.

It's a mystery to me why this captured the imagination of Europe, and then America, which I assume to be the case, judging by all the people who have been recommending it. (Library Journal says this is "for fans of the work of Alice Sebold, Pablo Neruda, and Paulo Coelho.") I did think the reading of it (Barbara Rosenblat doing the concierge, Renee Michel, and Cassandra Morris doing the precocious Paloma) was wonderful. But the "upstairs, downstairs" goings-on at 7 rue de Grenelle failed to hook my interest. (Speaking of upstairs, downstairs, I began watching the 1971 TV series Upstairs, Downstairs this year (never saw it when it was originally on TV) and have been loving that!)

A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson ©

2005. Abridged to 5 CDs. Read by the author.

Bryson was motivated by a desire to make science interesting. About textbook writers, he says, “It was as if they wanted to keep the good stuff secret by making all of it soberly unfathomable.” Unfortunately, I didn’t get anything out of this “breakneck tour of the sciences.” Apparently there is a deluxe illustrated version, and that probably would have helped. Or, maybe it was the abridgement that was the problem.

{Bob’s comment: Audio CD does not permit enough audience control; i.e. same limitation of a classroom.}

9 CDs. Too many names, too much detail, not enough payoff.

9 or so CDs. Adiga's first novel, and a winner of the Man Booker Prize. It's a depressing book, underlining the reality that large numbers of people are not benefitting from India's economic boom. The book takes the form of a series of letters written from Balram Halwai to Wen Jiabao, the premier of China. Balram heard on the radio that the premier wants to meet some entrepreneurs on his upcoming official visit to India.

"Apparently, sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don't have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs.”

Children/Young Adult books

Part of the Building History series, which also includes Stonehenge, the Parthenon, and The New York Subway System, to name a few. I learned much about French history from around 1632 (when Louis XIII expanded his original hunting lodge) to 1791 when Louis XVI and his queen, Marie-Antoinette were forced to flee Versailles during the French Revolution. The most notable shaping of the Palace, of course, was done by Louis XIV (1638–1715). Both XIV and XV (XV was the great-grandson of XIV) came to the throne at the age of five. One critic of the Palace (Henri de Montherlant) had this to say: “Versailles is a palace for the frivolous, a palace for dupes. … [T]his overwrought Versailles … appears to the senses and human vanity, nothing more; nothing moves the soul.”

The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events #1), by Lemony Snicket © 1999
On 3 CDs, from the library. I read this while trying to find books on CD for Catherine's children to listen to in the car, on the long drive to come visit us. In the end, I did not choose this book (aimed at the 9 to 12 crowd) about the Baudelaire orphans (Violet, Klaus, and Sunny) and all the misfortune that befalls them after their parents die, and they have to go live with Count Olaf. But, at least I know now something of what these books are like.

Books Sampled

A non-fiction exploration of the meaning of death. Good bits, but I couldn't read the whole book.

This was recommended by Bettina. I read the two short novellas (about 100 pages, total). A Hog Loves Its Life: Something About My Grandfather was my favorite. This fictionalized remembrance of his grandfather was written "for Herbert E Gurganus (1889-1965) and W. Ethel Pitt Gurganus (1889-1963)." From that, we know there were at least these two truths in the fictionalized account: the grandmother ("Ruth") dies a few years before the grandfather (known as "Grand" to his grandchildren), and the grandmother's maiden name really was Pitt ("My family's recent joke about our Ruth: 'She was from the Pitts.')

The other novella was Blessed Assurance: A Moral Tale. Memorable. About his first job, selling insurance door-to-door. Both are narrated in a first-person voice, and I thought they probably were very personal, an opinion shared by Library Journal, which thought the book to have "decidedly autobiographical overtones.”

{Bob could relate to this, because his own story had parallels.}

Loved the part about his childhood, and what it was like to be actively disliked by a teacher. (Teachers be warned: Kids have feelings! And some of them grow up to be writers!) I skimmed through the HS and college years. The author writes for The New York Times Magazine and other publications. I look forward to reading his stuff.

3 CDs. This was another of the children’s books I sampled. This was a good one. I see now, though, in reading a review, I clearly missed the visual treat of the book on paper by listening to the CD (see reviews section below). In November, I was delighted to hear that Martin Scorcese has a new film, Hugo, based on this book. Should be a good one for children.

4 CDs, read by the author. This was also quite good. Turns out the Linder children had already read it, though.

Book-related quotes, and quotes from books

''The luckiest person in the world is somebody who is born into a small, shabby-genteel town on a major railway connection with 24,000 souls and a bird sanctuary and whose grandfather owns a farm and whose father owns a business—whose family is mildly prosperous but not rich, which means you can leave the town."

- Allan Gurganus (as quoted by Mervyn Rothstein, The New York Times, Aug 14, 1989)

When I went to Boston in May, Ezra and I and Eva and Herman went to Mt. Auburn Cemetery, to see if we could "get" the Kentucky warbler that had been sighted there. While there, we were carried along in a wave of people to see some owls that were nesting. The area around the nest site had been cordoned off, but we could get close enough. While queued up to look through a scope, I mentioned that I was just reading a book called Wesley the Owl. Two women standing in front of me turned around to say enthusiastically, "Oh! I read that! Wonderful book!"

Reading and Writing

The second-most common thing people ask me (after “Where on earth do you get those ideas?”) is “Can you teach someone to write?” My answer: “No. But if someone is talented to begin with, I can save her a lot of time.”

- John Casey, as quoted in The Writing Life. Casey is author of Spartina, which won the National Book Award for fiction in 1989. He teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Bayley had the bad luck to come into his own as a critic and reviewer when departments of literature were turning away from what he cared about: the pleasures afforded by great writers and the ways in which life and work were intertwined. During the theory wars of the 1970's and 1980's, Bayley dug in: ''The inculcation of a critical system,'' he insisted, ''is no substitute for the free play of Jamesian intelligence which, like taste itself, cannot be taught.'' For Bayley, either you were a gifted reader or you weren't; going to graduate school wasn't going to change that.

- From a NY Times review (by James Shapiro, June 12, 2005) of John Bayley's The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature: Essays 1962 – 2002

Interviewer

Literature, then, can take a lot of forms—essays, poetry, fiction, journalism, all of which endeavor to tell the truth. You already were a very good essayist and journalist before you started to write fiction. Why did you choose fiction?

Julian Barnes

Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction. I practice both those media, and I enjoy both, but to put it crudely, when you are writing journalism your task is to simplify the world and render it comprehensible in one reading; whereas when you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world, to say things that are not as straightforward as might be understood from reading my journalism and to produce something that you hope will reveal further layers of truth on a second reading.

From a review of Penelope Lively’s 1994 memoir:

"Lively describes her education as something she and Lucy [her nanny, then governess] muddled through together, under a correspondence course for British children abroad called PNEU (Parents National Educational Union). If geometry proved intractable they would overkill on long-division. If 'Citizenship' fazed them, they read everything on the Lively bookshelves instead, from Greek mythology to Oscar Wilde. 'Reading was what we were best at and we knew it,' says Lively."

- Maggie Traugott, The Independent, 22 May 1994

What I think when I read a great novel, for example Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, which I think is one of the great novels of the twentieth century, a great English novel—although Americans admire it too—when I read something like that, I do, to a certain extent, absorb various technical things, for example about how far one can push an unreliable narrator. But the main lesson would be a general one: to take the idea you have for a novel and push it with passion, sometimes to the point of recklessness, regardless of what people are going to say—that is the way to do your best work. So The Good Soldier would be a parallel example rather than anything you might set out to copy. Anyway, again, what would be the point? Ford’s done it already. The true influence of a great novel is to say to a subsequent novelist, Go thou and do otherwise.

- Julian Barnes on Ford Madox Ford

{Bob’s comment: Could be said of the visual arts, politics, and so on.}

Excerpts

Nothing To Be Frightened Of

...Some years previously there had been a Stamp-Collecting Schism in our home. He [Julian's brother] had decided to specialize in the British Empire. I, to assert my difference, announced that I would therefore specialize in a category which I named, with what seemed like logic to me, Rest of the World. It was defined solely in terms of what my brother didn't collect. I can no longer remember if this move was aggressive, defensive, or merely pragmatic. All I know is that it led to some occasionally baffling exchanges in the school stamp club among philatelists only recently out of short trousers. "So, Barnesy, what do you collect?" "Rest of the World."

"People only believe in religion because they're afraid of death." This was a typical statement from my mother: lucid, opinionated, explicitly impatient of opposing views. Her dominance of the family, and her certainties about the world, made things usefully clear in childhood, restrictive in adolescence, and grindingly repetitive in adulthood.

The Optimist’s Daughter

[To set the stage for the dialogue that follows: No one in the town of Mt. Salus, MS had ever accepted Fay, the outsider from Texas whom Judge Clint McKelva had married after Laurel’s mother Becky had died. Four elderly neigh-bor women come over the day after Clint’s funeral to talk to his daughter Laurel about how it all went, and how glad they are that Fay temporarily left town with her family.]

“Well, we got her out of the house,” Miss Tennyson Bullick said. “Fay’s gone!”

“Don’t brag too soon,” said old Mrs. Pease.

“And I felt more ashamed for Fay when she upped and told us goodbye and went off with the rest of the Chisoms. I reckon she thought we might not let her go. But we didn’t beg her any too hard to stay, did we?” Miss Tennyson sank back deeper into the old chair.

“I got the notion if Fay hadn’t turned around quick, they might’ve just settled in here with her,” said old Mrs. Pease. “When old Mrs. What’s-her-name stepped off the reach of the front porch, I had an anxious moment, I can tell you.”

. . .

“Of course I must get back to work,” said Laurel.

“Back to work.” Miss Tennyson pointed her finger at Laurel and told the others, “That girl’s had more now than she can say grace over. And she’s going back to that life of labor when she could just as easily give it up. Clint’s left her a grand hunk of money.”

“Once you leave after this, you’ll always come back as a visitor,” Mrs. Pease warned Laurel. “Feel free, of course—but it was always my opinion that people don’t really want visitors.”

“Laurel, look yonder. You still might change your mind if you could see the roses bloom, see Becky’s Climber come out,” said Miss Tennyson softly.

“I can imagine it, in Chicago.”

“But you can’t smell it,” Miss Tennyson argued.

As the conversation goes on, one of the neighbors blurts this out to Laurel (who was widowed young):

“I don’t see nothin’ wrong with you. Why didn’t you ever go ahead and marry you another somebody?”

The White Tiger

...the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse.

The trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy.

About Alice

I got a lot of letters like the one from a young woman in New York who wrote that she sometimes looked at her boyfriend and thought, ‘But will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?’ ”

Reviews and Commentary

It is an easy job to say that an elephant, however good, is not a good warthog; for most criticism comes to that."

- Ford Madox Ford, as quoted by Julian Barnes

The Prince of Frogtown

He talked to his daddy's childhood friend Shirley Brown, his cousin Carlos Slaght and his running-around buddies Bill Joe Chaney and Jack Andrews. He tracked down the man his daddy fist-fought when they were boys. "I think this one was the first book about family that didn't come mostly from family," Bragg says. "This one I had to go out and shake the trees and pound on doors to get people to talk to me, and a lot of people didn't want to."

- From an interview with Rick Bragg (by Bob Carlton, in the Birmingham News)

Moe Prager Mysteries

From the one book in the series that I tried, I cannot agree with Maureen Corrigan who said (on Fresh Air), when discussing her Best Books of 2009: “Any year in which I stumble on a terrific new mystery series is a bull market year for me; this past summer, a wise independent bookseller recommended that I read the Moe Prager mysteries set in Brooklyn and starring a Jewish former police detective. The atmospheric Prager series is written by Reed Farrel Coleman who just may be the only mystery writer licensed to drive trucks filled with hazardous materials like nuclear waste.”

“The Shawl” and “Rosa”

From a review on Amazon: “Rosa carries horrible memories of the Holocaust, certainly, but part of what she laments is her loss of status. Due to the evils perpetrated by the Nazis, she went from somebody to nobody. … A note of hope enters in the figure of an elderly suitor Persky who attempts to woo Rosa back to a life of her own. But as Ozick makes painfully clear, the message of Rosa's life is that what has been most loved in the past is far more real than any present or future can be.”

The Good Soldier

"The central theme of the novel is the fundamental unreliability of narration. John Dowell is frequently confounded by the impossibility of telling the truth, which is [the process] of recording events and actions, but with the authenticity of lived experience. His narrative is comically undermined throughout as the stakes of truth on which his life is founded are shown to be flimsy shams."

- Wikipedia

Family Album

All "happy family" novels are alike. They present the shiny, noisy, splashy surface of family life, ruffled only by obligatory eccentricity. Then, before long, the shadows begin to slide along beneath, leaving the reader to guess which are the harmless tangles, and which the tooth-baring sharks. The murkier the layers of secrecy, the more satisfying the schadenfreude. ... The adult children of Alison, an almost aggressively home-loving mother and general bodyguard of family myths, and Charles, an emotionally absent writer, return to Allersmead insultingly rarely, and have failed to reproduce, despite reaching their 30s and 40s. ... Penelope Lively is perhaps best known for her Booker-winning Moon Tiger, and her children's novels such as A Stitch in Time and The House in Norham Gardens.

- Joanna Briscoe, The Guardian, 8 Aug 2009

Fun Home

The narrative of Fun Home is non-linear and recursive. Incidents are told and re-told in the light of new information or themes. Bechdel describes the structure as a labyrinth, “going over the same material, but starting from the outside and spiraling in to the center of the story."

- Wikipedia

Bechdel’s years of drawing a serial comic strip have honed her ability to convey oceans of feeling in a single image, and the feelings are never simple; Fun Home shimmers with regret, compassion, annoyance, frustration, pity and love. – salon.com

Alison Bechdel took photographs of herself posing as each character, to use as reference in her drawing. Here, she poses for a drawing of her father.

The Secret Scripture

"[Dr. Grene] attempts to reconstruct the reasons for her imprisonment, as it turns out to be, and that pitches the novel into the dark depths of Ireland’s civil war and the anti-woman proscriptions on sexuality of the national regime Joyce famously called “priestridden.”"

– from a Booklist review

"Roseanne reveals that Fr. Gaunt annulled her marriage after glimpsing her in the company of another man; Gaunt's official charge was nymphomania [!!!], and the cumulative fallout led to a string of tragedies."

– a Publishers Weekly review

The Optimist’s Daughter

In this, her last-published and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, all of her vast thematic resources concerning memory and myth, ritual and order, converge in the dual axes of the provocative but static image of a dead male as the center of a female ritual and the invisible but dynamic sense of a dead female, the true center of meaning in the novel.

- “The Feminine and Feminist Texts of Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter,” by Ruth D. Weston, 1987

A Short History of Nearly Everything

From a review on Amazon: “I enjoy reading popular science, and much of what I've read I've found better than Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. I would especially recommend Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, Alan Guth and Martin Rees for physics, astronomy and cosmology, and Richard Dawkins and Stephen J. Gould for biology.”

Another reviewer: “Bryson's not up there with pros like Timothy Ferris yet, but his talent, wit, and enthusiasm for his subject make this more than just a vanity project.”

Beautiful Boy

Sheff's son Nic was by all appearances a happy child, but by the time he was in middle school he was drinking alcohol and smoking pot on a daily basis. In high school he experimented with ecstasy, LSD and cocaine, but was also an honor student and co-captain of the high school water polo team. When he tried crystal meth at age 18, he experienced a feeling of euphoria that lasted for several hours and was followed by a deep depression as the drug wore off. He became immediately addicted and began to use methamphetamine constantly in an attempt to maintain the euphoric feeling and avoid the pain of crashing.

- a discussion of the book on a drug rehab website

Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate

From a review on Amazon: “To the many varieties of memoir—the traditional dysfunctional-childhood and adventure memoirs, and the newer "stunt memoir"—we now have to add a new one: The nerd memoir. I'm thinking of Just For Fun by Linus Torvalds, the inventor of Linux, and House of Cards by David Ellis Dickerson— both stories of smart, unconventional, and maybe misfit men who, through various trials, find their path in life. Wisenheimer fits right into this category.”

Another reviewer: “The "how [blank] changed my life" genre is hardly a new one and, without intending to, I've read several such books in the last few years, from Ariel Sabar's exploration of his family's history (My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq) to Andy Raskin's love song to Japanese noodles (The Ramen King and I: How the Inventor of Instant Noodles Fixed My Love Life) to Roger Martin's post-cancer return to undergraduate education (Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again). I have no hesitation in putting this alongside Sabar's as one of the best in a crowded field.”

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

With characteristic intelligence, exquisite images, and a breathtaking design, Selznick shatters conventions related to the art of bookmaking in this magical mystery set in 1930s Paris. He employs wordless sequential pictures and distinct pages of text to let the cinematic story unfold, and the artwork, rendered in pencil and bordered in black, contains elements of a flip book, a graphic novel, and film. … Selznick's art ranges from evocative, shadowy spreads of Parisian streets to penetrating character close-ups.

– School Library Journal

The book won the 2008 Caldecott Medal, the first novel to do so, as the Caldecott Medal is for picture books. The book’s primary inspiration is the true story of turn-of-the-century pioneer filmmaker Georges Méliès, his surviving films, and his collection of mechanical, wind-up figures called automata. … Méliès … did work in a toy booth in a Paris railway station, hence the setting.

- Wikipedia

This page has been accessed times since Dec. 28, 2011 Last revised: Dec. 28, 2011

This page has been accessed times since Dec. 28, 2011

Last revised: Dec. 28, 2011