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When people ask me to recommend a general history of Paris--

Actually, people never ask me that, not that way. But they do often ask for a Paris 101 guide--not a travel guide, but a book that will introduce them to Paris past and present. The book I always recommend first is Graham Robb's THE PARISIANS.

It's not a comprehensive history of Paris, and that's just fine (there's too much blood in a comprehensive history of Paris). It is, rather, an idiosyncratic tour through time that alights in a series of interesting places and periods throughout the city and then, through Robb's vivid, smart prose, brings a parade of Parisians to life. It's a marvelous book. What was it like visiting Haussmann's office when he was in the midst of tearing Paris apart in the 19th century? What's it like to cycle from the center of Paris today out through the incredibly diverse banlieues? Read Robb and find out: two completely different journeys in this completely different book. Whenever I go to Paris, I'm never entirely sure where I'll end up. But I know that this book is always a good place to start.

We used to live in DC, and whenever the new political tell-all book came out--and I'm guessing we're about to enter a new golden era of these--the joke was that DC types always read such books starting with the index. Who's mentioned? Who's absent?

My edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas doesn't have an index of names, but if it did, it might run as long as the book itself: Picasso, Hemingway, Matisse, Cezanne, Apollinaire -- to say nothing of Hélène, Gertrude Stein's cook, who did not care for Matisse at all:

Hélène had her opinions, she did not for instance like Matisse. She said a frenchman should not stay unexpectedly to a meal particularly if he asked the servant beforehand what there was for dinner. She said foreigners had a perfect right to do these thing but not a frenchman and Matisse had once done it. So when Miss Stein said to her, Monsieur Matisse is staying for dinner this evening, she would say, in that case I will not make an omelette but fry the eggs. It takes the same number of effs and the same amount of butter but it shows less respect, and he will understand.

The sly wink of the book's cover--that this autobiography is not, in fact, written by Alice Toklas but her longtime partner Gertrude Stein, still causes me to do a double take, even though I've long come around to the opinion that this really IS an autobiography, if channeled through another writer. Every so often Stein's voice and thoughts does break into the text--and I think Alice would have been apt and able to punctuate all the words that needed punctuating--but otherwise, one of the marvels of this text, Stein's most readable, is that Toklas really does come alive on the page, voice and all.

On the plaque outside their famed salon at 27, rue de Fleurus, in the 6th, Stein's name is several sizes larger than the rest of the text. But even to the speediest person walking by--because what painters and poets still ring the bell here?--Alice's name, embedded in the brief caption beneath Stein, still shines through--much as she does in this surprisingly giddy book.

I've visited Paris often, but I've never been so fortunate as to live there, so while researching my forthcoming novel (Paris by the Book), I read the memoirs of as many people as I could. Few left more of an indelible mark than Kate Betts's MY PARIS DREAM .

Though it's a beautiful cover--and title--what remains with me from this book is how very real, and how very not dreamlike its Paris is. We're not 11 pages in before Betts mentions the bombings that terrorized the city in the late 1980s (just before she's due to arrive, her degree from Princeton, where she was a French major, firmly in hand).

Paris is beautiful, and Betts captures that beauty, particularly its world of fashion and design (as would only befit someone who later came to edit Harper's Bazaar). But Betts is also unflinching in depicting the more difficult aspects of living in Paris (and navigating a tough workplace environments -- her clear-eyed account of working with fashion journalism legend John Fairchild is bracing: "You wicked witch," he tells her when she announces she's departing his employ for Vogue).

But hand this book to anyone in Betts's position today--some young French major, freshly graduated, looking longingly to Paris--and I've no doubt they'd still want to get on the next plane, so entranced with the story of Betts's journey, and her Paris, even though its beset with terrorism once more.

James Baldwin's wide-ranging essay collection NOTES OF A NATIVE SON is not specifically a Paris book -- not, anyway, in the sense that his novel GIOVANNI'S ROOM is. And given that the novel even has a scene in a bookshop, it's all the more relevant to my year-long #parisbythebook project -- but that's for another day).

But "Equal in Paris," which has few equals as an essay, is the urgent read this week. In truth, Baldwin is always an urgent read. In his essays in particular, his prose is so surefooted, so sharp, it's literally breathtaking for me -- as in, when I reach a paragraph like this*, and its devastating final sentence, it's a moment or two before I remember: breathe. And when I do, I remember what Baldwin's still telling us, decades on: we have an awful lot of work still to do.

*[As context: Baldwin has been arrested and put on trial because an acquaintance stole a hotel bedsheet, or drap de lit. Better context, just read the original .] "The story of the drap de lit, finally told, caused great merriment in the courtroom, whereupon my friend decided that the French were 'great.' I was chilled by their merriment, even though it was meant to warm me. It could only remind me of the laughter I had often heard at home, laughter which I had sometimes deliberately elicited. This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real. I had heard it so often in my native land that I had resolved to find a place where I would never hear it any more. In some deep, black, stony, and liberating way, my life, in my own eyes, began during that first year in Paris, when it was borne in on me that this laughter is universal and never can be stilled."

When I recently went looking in search of the publication date of Thad Carhart's book,
THE PIANO SHOP ON THE LEFT BANK,
I couldn't believe it came out fully 15 years ago.
It feels like everyone was talking about that book just last year

And maybe they were -- it has wonderful staying power. Carhart -- once Apple's PR person in Europe -- writes a wonderfully engaging memoir about the tiny piano shop he discovers, its remarkable proprietor, Luc, and, of course, the piano he comes to own (along with an unforgettable account of its travel up multiple flights of stairs with nothing more than a pair of hands and a deliveryman's broad back).

One thing that's always struck me about Paris is how it supports this entire ecosystem of tiny, specialized stores. Or maybe it doesn't support them: I always wonder how this tiny shop of puzzles, or that one of antique sports equipment, makes it. Who are the buyers?

Carhart, in this case. It's a wonderful story, and it was wonderful news when I saw that he was touring with a new memoir, Finding Fontainebleau: An American Boy in France. An account of his growing up (for a spell) in Paris as the son of a NATO officer, it's a book I'm eager to read -- and more to the point, buy, from as small a shop as I can find.

Before there was , there was Adele and Simon the children's book series, which I am highlighting in this week as part of my every-Tuesday-a-new-Paris-book recommendation.

Barbara McClintock's books are all beautiful, but I am partial to this one; from the illustrations, whose careful, soft detail perfectly evoke the turn-of-the-century Paris they depict, to the font, to the book's overall packaging--am I the only person in the world so obsessed with endpapers? Perhaps, but the Baedeker reproductions here are gorgeous--this is a picture book for kids and adults alike.

Follow them around Paris as the two children lose things--and then, if you like, follow them around Paris for real, since McClintock includes a lovely guide, with ample historical background, in the back of the book. I'm on as being a fan of leading your kids around Paris with the help of children's books, and this is one of the best sources of that kind of fun. Fair warning -- my then-young daughters and I tried it, and Adele and Simon's 'walk' is not a short one. Perhaps best to enjoy in the comfort of a nice armchair--or bed--first.

Not as pure a Paris book as the others in my Tuesday Paris book recommendation series, but it's my blog, I love the book, and I once went hiking with the author, who is as good an egg as they come.

Given all the attention the book has gotten, though, it can be difficult to find something new to say -- but here's where it's handy to think of this as a Paris book, or at least to celebrate that section of the novel that is set in Paris. I don't know if you need to love Paris, have a daughter, or written a novel yourself about parenting in Paris, but possessing all those characteristics myself definitely affected how I read the book, particularly when the brave, beleagured father sets out to teach his blind daughter how to navigate the Left Bank. What's particularly glorious about this scene is how it captures how Paris is embedded in so many people's memories, even those who have only visited through the pages of a book. As much as I rely on Google Maps nowadays, there are times when I'm in Paris and I put my phone away, confident I can navigate by memory--even if those memories come from books like Doerr's.

There's a certain giddiness that suffuses many Paris memoirs, even the sad or bitter ones (of which there are quite a few, perhaps even a majority). Not so Alex Karmel's A CORNER IN THE MARAIS, which takes a quiet, thoughtful, and historically-informed approach to a somewhat familiar subject: the couple who's long wanted an apartment in Paris finally finds one.

If reading that last sentence whets your appetite for sawdust and anecdotes of contractor frustration, look elsewhere (perhaps at Ron Tanner's excellent ANIMAL HOUSE TO OUR HOUSE , but if you're looking for a thorough investigation of a storied quarter of Paris, stop here first.

On my last trip to Paris, I found myself in the Marais (as always), engaged (as always) in my least favorite Paris pasttime, Finding the Perfect Place to Eat. I've rarely been disappointed by a Paris meal, but I'm always sure that I'm missing out on a more transcendent experience just around the next corner. But on this evening, I'd kept looking around those next corners so much that I'd walked straight through the dinner hour and finally found myself at a tiny little sidewalk crêperie on a quiet street. The food was fine. The service was professional. The wine was incredible. But more incredible still, once I settled back, was the realization that I was sitting...just beneath Karmel's apartment building. Parfait.

[In anticipation of the publication of my novel, Paris by the Book, next April, I'm recommending a different Paris book each Tuesday. Yes, I missed last Tuesday -- but it was July 4!]

I loved Elaine's book because it does something that most Parisians do but most outside Paris do not, which is to consider the city on a tiny scale. While this is true of many city dwellers -- New York friends of mine in Brooklyn often shake their head at how hard it is to get Manhattan friends to visit them and vice versa -- it seems to me particularly true in Paris. It's not just a city of neighborhoods, but streets, and people have a fierce loyalty to their local shopkeepers. Calvin Trillin has a line somewhere that says his definition of a wimp is someone who doesn't think his hometown makes the best hamburger in America. Change the terms a bit -- baguette for hamburger, hometown for street -- and I think you could apply this to Paris as well. (Where I've never had a good hamburger, though unfortunately my daughters have, over the years, insisted I try several.)

While I want to place this book on the shelf of Great Bar Literature (cf. Mitchell's McSorley's Wonderful Saloon), "Jimmie the Barman"'s book is not that. What it is, though, is a gossipy romp through Lost Generation Paris by an expat British barkeep who tended to all sorts of lost souls. His dishing fluctuates between mild and mean; one of his more memorable lines is about Hemingway's THE SUN ALSO RISES, The Sun Also Rises, which Jimmie calls "six characters in search of an author--each with a gun". Jimmie is playing on the title of the Pirandello play (1921) Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays but also on the open secret that Hemingway had stolen details from all his friends' lives to create the book. Then again, Jimmie himself may have stolen the Pirandello line from a book reviewer, Cleveland Chase (these names!).

It's up to you to decide who has the last laugh, Hemingway or Jimmie -- the latter somehow convinced the former to write a foreword for the book, which he did, not having read a word of it, a fact Hemingway proudly boasts of in the foreword itself. In short, take all this with a grain of salt, or the shot of your choice.