pottering

I did some sleuthing and found a promising second hand english book source by the quaint name of 'tea and tattered pages'. So I went investigating last night, everything about this shop is quaint; from the red shop front, to the name,the cluttered shelves, the book dust (at-choo!) and the charming american couple who own it, the friendly yellow cat and the dinky little seating area where you can have a cuppa and leisurely peruse your book choices (so many descriptions I lost track of my punctuation). Amongst my choices was 'the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes', and then 'the curious incident of the dog in the night-time', which is a mystery tale told from the point of view of a young boy with autism (who, in addition to being obsessed with detail at a whole other level, is also fixated on Sherlock Holmes).

Still, the upshot is, my literary friends can rest easy (yes, I know you've been having sleepless nights) as I now have a source of affordable books! Having recently finished 'Almost French' - story of an Australian woman settling in Paris, I have to admit to being a little disappointed,and even mildly irritated by it (possibly describing herself and boyfriend cutting across footpaths on his motorbike got me a little offside). I'm not sure what kind of 'petit bourgeois' crowd she was hanging out with, but they didn't strike me as particularly typical, and she portayed an intially very naive view of France, followed by a very superficial one.