I have a recurring fantasy of spending a vacation reading. I buy a stack of books whenever I go on a trip, assuming I'll have plenty of free time to lounge in some foreign street cafe and immerse myself into the fiction I never get to during the drudgery of my work weeks. Of course, this rarely happens. Wherever I go, I'm generally too busy getting to know the place to read anything beyond my Lonely Planet guide - with the exception maybe of Italy, where I did make it through a fabulous Sicilian classic (Di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo) on those long train rides from Rome to Naples and Positano and then back up to Tuscany.
There are no long train rides planned for our trip to Mumbai, but there are some godawful long plane journeys involved, so I did compile a reading list, and my bestest friend Roger went out and got me all the books on my list for my birthday - thanks so much, Rogie! And thanks also for the great card that came in the mail yesterday :)
I already made it through The Elegance of the Hedgehog during my sick days this week, and loved it. Kindred spirits - balm on my wounded soul, predictably. It's all I can do to stop myself from packing up and moving back to Paris, to eat madeleines while discussing Ozu and lamenting the latest excesses of post-structuralism.
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