More about airplane books

As if 950 pages of carryon reading (see previous post) didn't convince me to look for something a little more portable, I succumbed to the lure of a previously un-read classic and bought a paperback copy of The Count of Monte Cristo the day before leaving for Las Vegas.

At 1452 pages, the book weighed down my purse, but it was worth the trouble - I read about 250 pages during the flight, and got through another couple of hundred during the weekend, without being rude or anti-social. (My sensible sister-in-law was reading a truly pocket-sized book. My brother rolled his eyes when I brought out the Count.)

I don't know how I had missed reading the book all this time, because Dumas' other best-known classic, The Three Musketeers, was my favorite read and re-read in junior high and high school.

Having at last encountered Edmond Dantès, I recommend him to everyone. In spite of the Victorian English of the translation, the book is, as they say, a "ripping yarn." Lorenzo Carcaterra, who contributed an excellent introduction to the Modern Library paperback, describes the book as the ultimate revenge fantasy, but Edmond is driven as much by his desire to right the wrongs done to his friends as by a thirst for vengeance.

Because Dumas wrote for serialization, he could take time to describe, to develop character, to set the scene. The book is cinematic - no wonder it has been filmed many times.

And if the story sometimes requires too much suspension of disbelief, remember that it's a fantasy, peopled with scheming villains of both sexes, a mysterious mute Nubian servant, a beautiful Greek slave, lovers parted by dreadful circumstances, illegitimate children who discover their true parentage in improbable ways - and a hero who overcomes every obstacle that comes his way, no matter how formidable.

And its most stirring underlying theme is the power of education to enlarge the world and mitigate desperate situations. Edmond survives 14 years in the Chateau d'If not only because of his dreams of revenge but also because of knowledge imparted by his fellow prisoner, the Abbé Faria.

I just wish I had discovered the book before visiting Marseilles. Now I have to go back, to see the landmarks that remain.

Airplane reading

For me, the most important thing to pack for a flight - long or short - is a good book.

If only I could keep the book to a reasonable size. Even on a long flight it's almost impossible to finish an entire book - and yet I persist in carting along reading material the size of a doorstop.

For example, Sacred Games, an absolutely fascinating read. I actually bought the book in 2007, soon after it came out in paperback, and read about half of it before getting distracted. A day or two before leaving for Paris, I picked it up, decided it was reasonable to start from page 1 again, and stuffed it into the carryon.

"Stuffed" is the operative word here, because the book is 950+ pages long. You need two bookmarks - one to mark your place, one for the glossary of Hindi words (lots of expletives you probably haven't heard before) liberally sprinkled throughout the text.

The book is - loosely - about cops and robbers in Bombay (Chandra's preferred name for the city known as Mumbai.) There's a hardworking Sikh police detective, a Hindu gangster, a guru in a wheelchair, a movie star, a madam, a love story, a mystery, a terrorist plot - and a time frame that ranges from Partition, in 1947, to the present. It's as Bollywood-influenced as "Slumdog Millionaire," but far more intricate and thoughtful.

Well worth checking out, even if you're not planning a long flight. (But it's a good argument for investing in a Kindle!)

Brief visit to another planet...

Otherwise known as a weekend in Las Vegas, first time I'd ever been there.

I flew down on Thursday, invited to spend a few days with my brother and his wife, who were attending an "owners' party weekend" sponsored by their vacation resort company. It was a good chance to catch up in person, as we don't often get together.

"Of course you'll have to listen to the sales spiel," he reminded me.

But the spiel came after a couple of days in which we had attended a party at the condo complex, a buffet dinner and this show at the Mirage, and checked out as much of the Strip as we could before heat and sore feet wore us down!

We're gawkers, not gamblers - and what a place to gawk! At the Mirage, I could happily have spent part of the evening just watching the tropical fish in the aquarium that is the wall behind the lobby desk.

And there's nothing nicer than swimming outdoors during really hot weather. The condo pool was pleasant at the deep end and almost too warm in the shallow, and once out, I barely needed a towel to dry off.

I didn't buy into the resort plan (though my brother was able to pick up a considerable number of shares very reasonably - deals abound these days if you're able to take advantage of them.)

Nicest surprise of the weekend came Thursday morning in the Seattle airport, where I encountered two friends (who are among my seven or eight loyal readers!) at the check-in area. Their flight was leaving for California, ten minutes after mine, from the next gate, giving us time for a pleasantly serendipitous visit.

In Seattle, we've had 26 days without rain. Astonishing.

Back to real life...

Which is, of course, not a bad thing, especially now that the weather has returned to normal daytime temperatures (70's instead of the 80's and 90's we had last week.)

But I went to meetings and Pilates, managing not to yawn too much anywhere. Jet lag takes about a week to go away completely.

It was eerie to listen to the news of the Air France crash and to be able to picture so vividly the interior of the Airbus 330 - it's exactly the same plane AF uses on the Seattle-Paris flight.

The heat wave broke with a rush of wind through the house on Thursday night. Sparky, who had spent most of the week stretched out as flat as possible, in any cool or dark space she could find, suddenly came to life, dashing around like a kitten.

Because everyone was free for the weekend, we went to Vashon Saturday morning, for a fix of island peace and quiet. Though our usual pattern is to do all meals at the cabin, this time we went out to dinner, at La Boucherie, a small (the deck is bigger than the seating area inside) meat shop/restaurant that is an extension of a thriving organic farm. Leah is cooking and baking there on weekends, and she alerted us to a special event scheduled for Saturday night - a true carnivore's dinner.

We're up for trying just about anything - just as well, since the many small dishes presented included both pork heart (delicious) and pig's - ahem - testicles (interesting to try - once.) My mother, the daughter of an English butcher, served organ meats of all kinds when we were growing up, but I had not eaten so many different parts of an animal since attending a wedding feast in Transylvania a few years ago.

Just to keep things in balance, there were vegetables, a palate-cleansing green salad, as well as a very interesting tiny glass of grapefruit juice infused with basil.

The point of the restaurant is to make a feast from food grown on the island, and the variety of tastes was fascinating. Even the wine was semi-local -- produced on the island, from grapes grown in drier and sunnier places.

A hundred years ago, Vashon was the site of several large fruit-growing and canning operations, and jams and jellies were among the first new local products to emerge in the 70's and 80's. Now at the busy Saturday farmer's market, you can find island fruits, vegetables, fish and meat - and these lovely chocolates!

Home again -

And still waking up very early (not to mention longing for sleep at 8:30 p.m.!)

Unusually early morning hours are great for wading through accumulated mail. Because of all the bad economic news, I was amazed to find so many invitations salted among the bills & advertising. Came home too late to accept any - no regrets.

Seattle continues in full good-weather mode: few clothes, goofy expressions. After all, this could disappear overnight (just as it does in Paris!) Rhododendrons are glorious. I don't know if they are more opulent than usual this year (because of the cold winter?) or if it's just that I am hyper-aware, since I left town before most were fully in bloom.

I'm still a fan of the Air France flight. Even when the plane is packed full, the service is good, and the food in tourist class is just fine. We landed in Seattle exactly on time Wednesday, and it was possible to watch the landing on the tiny back-of-the-seat TV screen. This is not guaranteed to make me want to fly a very large airplane (or even a small one) but it was fascinating.

No, the picture isn't my favorite Seattle coffee shop - it's the restaurant where I had lunch in Paris on Monday. I could not resist the impulse to add one more Paris picture to the blog.

More Paris promenades -

or, "How do I make the sunburn go away??"

Paris is another place where, if you don't like the weather, you should just wait a bit. Because of the up and down nature of this month - a good day followed by rain or overcast - I wasn't surprised to see clouds this morning after yesterday's clear warmth.

The real surprise was that the clouds quickly burned off, and the day turned seriously hot. Even the natives complained (although they quickly retrieved summer clothes and sunglasses, and most women seem to have tans already!)

Welcoming any stray breezes, I walked along the Seine from the Gare d'Austerlitz to Notre Dame, then on to the Cluny museum. After the museum, I walked further into the 6th, first for lunch, then to find a bus that would take me back to the 17th. Some Parisian buses are air-conditioned, but this one made do with a vent that opened in the roof.

The Cluny, home of the "Lady and the Unicorn" tapestries, seems more beautiful and well-organized every time I go there. Because of large corporate donations, the museum has developed a number of new exhibit areas, and redeployed some of its smaller treasures (ivory coffrets, enamel pieces) to better advantage. And it's always interesting to see how the excavated parts of the huge Roman bath house that first stood on this site continue to be incorporated into "The Museum of the Middle Ages."

Here's a fragment of stained glass, mounted along with many others on a lighted wall in a dark corridor. I like the red feet on the patridges ("perdrix.")

Playing tourist -

Yesterday Paris reverted to gray windy weather, with heavy storm clouds piling up in the afternoon. Rain never happened, but the threat was there.

Today, by contrast, a hot sun came up. I got into full tourist mode by taking the Metro to Bastille, closest embarkation point for the boat trip up the Canal St. Martin. After last year's trip down the Danube, the locks on the canal looked pretty tame, but the long tunnel the boat goes through at the beginning of the trip was attention-getting.


The trip is worth doing, especially on a hot spring morning just before full tourist season. Because some neighborhoods along the canal figure prominently in French mysteries (Inspector Maigret lived on the Blvd. Richard Lenoir) and movies (Marcel Carne filmed "Hotel du Nord" in 1938 in a building that is still called Hotel du Nord, whether or not it actually figured in the movie) canal boats are evocatively named. The boat I was on was the Arletty - the one we passed, about halfway through the trip, was, of course, Marcel Carne.

Boats go all the way to Parc de la Villette, a huge, elaborate park that began to take shape more than 20 years ago, on the site that was formerly the stockyards/abbatoir of Paris.

In 1990, Terry and I took the Metro a long way out of the usual tourist circuit to see the park, which he had read about in Landscape Architecture magazine. We had it almost to ourselves that late October day, because crews were still at work, planting and shaping, and many of the buildings that now draw people to the site were still under construction.


He wanted to come back, to see the trees grown up and the park full of people. He felt sure it would be a hugely important place, and it is - that entire area of Paris continues to transform because of the park.

Across from the end of the boat ride I lucked into a "Brocante" market - antiques and collectibles, rather like the Fremont Market on steroids - or a giant "vide grenier." There were lovely things, but I resisted them all - a small suitcase is a powerful dis-incentive to shopping!

Although the commentator on the boat made sure to direct passengers to the nearest Metro so they could go directly back to Bastille, I just wandered, eventually ending up at a cafe on the corner of Rue de Lafayette and a couple of other streets. Excellent "salad cantalou" - a sort of enhanced potato salad, with prosciutto and a couple of kinds of cheese.


Then I walked on as far as the Gare de l'Est, where I got on a bus that I knew goes somewhere near my neighborhood. Fascinating ride, through some areas I've never visited, and a roundabout entry to this part of the 17th. Without being exactly sure where I was, I managed to get off at a stop that was a short walk to a street that leads directly to Rue de Courcelles, a block from Villa Monceau.

Although it's probably dangerous to think one actually knows a part of Paris, the thought is there!