Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Nearly Broke My Heart / William Alexander

Not since David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day have I read such a humorous and entertaining chronicle of an adult attempting to learn French.

There are many funny language situations, made all the more amusing by the author’s apparent linguistic tone deafness. Can a 58-year-old pick up a language like French? He discusses this proposition with some experts and cites some linguistic theory behind the mechanism of language learning, interspersed with his dogged (and frequently laughable) attempts to master French. Alexander seems to eschew the traditional approach of memorizing verb forms and vocabulary (forever scarred by a battle axe school teacher), and instead embraces the purportedly effortless newfangled approaches of products like Rosetta Stone and social media with native speakers. All of this is complicated with recurring medical drama he has with his heart (alluded to in the subtitle), problems that he speculates may be stress-induced due to his attempts at tackling French. In the end he seems to reach détente with his target language. A scan of his brain seems to prove that he recognizes French prosody, but still can’t understand much. Oh well, at least he can negotiate a taxi ride at the airport during a bomb scare and has learned never to order rognons de veau. Can a 58-year-old learn French? In this case he can (sort of), as long as he keeps a sense of humor.

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No

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