2025 Readings 43

 My old friend Doug, who was my best friend in graduate school, used to opine that you should never buy anything from a store with the word "World" in it. In my highly flawed memory he had gone to a store called ComputerWorld and it had ended badly. However, the more I think about this memory the more I realize that this is either a deeply flawed memory or the entire story from beginning to end was apocryphal. Anyway, I guess the point is that you should be suspicious of your sources, so even if the particular story is flawed it doesn't diminish the essential truth of the story. With that in mind, I'll add another essential truism: never read a book that was promoted by Oprah.com. As part of this year of giving myself less guiltily over to extended reading, I'm also, as I've previously mentioned, reading books that I would not normally read. With that in mind, on the previous trip to Northshire Bookstore I picked up a copy of Nina George's The Little Paris Bookshop (so maybe, after all, this is Northshire's fault). It was described as a book for booklovers, and who doesn't love Paris? Anyway, it's pretty dreadful. Fran Lebowitz famously proposed that, "Donald Trump is a stupid man's idea of a smart man, a poor man's idea of a rich man, and a weak man's idea of a strong man." Sadly, I think that The Little Paris Bookshop is a non-booklover's idea of what a booklover would write (or want to read). It has moments of wild coincidence that Charles Dickens would have made work - and moments of clumsy magical realism that Gabriel Garcia Marquez would have made sing - but none of it works in this book.