📚READING / LISTENING TO 
Highlighting here only a couple:
📚 Fifteen Days in Paris,
by Jon Davey
Nonfiction / Travel / Memoir
2025
310 pages
Review copies available!
“How do you get to know a city?
Friends, guidebooks and influencers can point you to the agreed list of must-sees, but a city is so much more than its tourist landmarks.
In 2010, Jon Davey spent fifteen days in Paris as a student photographer.
He’d gone there without a plan so each day began with a clean slate, stepping out onto the streets of the Marais and then just wandering around, taking in whatever came his way.
A flâneur long before he even knew the word.”
I am just at the beginning, but I already like the serendipity aspect highlighted by the author.
📚 Regarde les lumières mon amour,
by Annie Ernaux
Nonfiction / Memoir
2014
112 pages
Exists in English:
Look at the Lights, My Love
Reading for #20booksofSummer2025
I was very impressed by Les Années/The Years, but thought her other books were of no interest to me. Until I bumped into this less popular one.
I have alaredy read about 20%, I don’t think this one will blow me away.
Here is the synopsis of the English edition:
“For half a century, French writer Annie Ernaux has restlessly explored stories and subjects often considered unworthy of artistic reflection. In this exquisite meditation, Ernaux turns her attention to the phenomenon of the big-box superstore, a ubiquitous feature of modern life that has received scant attention in literature—until now.
Recording her visits to a single superstore in Paris for over a year, Ernaux captures the world that exists within its massive walls. Culture, class, and capitalism converge, reinscribing the individual’s role and rank within society while absorbing individuality into the machine of mass consumerism. Through Ernaux’s eyes, the superstore emerges as a “great human meeting place, a spectacle”—one of the few spaces where we come into direct contact with difference. She notes the unexpectedly intimate encounters between customers; how our collective desires are dictated by the daily, seasonal, and annual rhythms of the marketplace; and the ways that the built environment reveals the contours of gender and race in contemporary society.”
🎧A Shilling for Candles
(Inspector Alan Grant #2)
by Josephine Tey
Narrated by Jennifer M. Dixon
Mystery
1936
240 pages
Am listening for The Classics Spin
I really enjoyed the first book in this series, and of course The Daughter of Time (#5), so I am thrilled the spin fell on this one.
Unfortunately, I don’t enjoy it as much as the other books I have read by her. On the slow side.
“When a woman’s body washes up on an isolated stretch of beach on the southern coast of England, Scotland Yard’s Inspector Alan Grant is on the case. But the inquiry into her death turns into a nightmare of false leads and baffling clues. Was there anyone who didn’t want lovely screen actress Christine Clay dead?”
BOOK UP NEXT 🎧
📚 Artificial Wisdom,
by Thomas R. Weaver
Scifi mystery
2023
433 pages
Received through Netgalley for review
Reading for #20booksofSummer2025
I succumbed again to the offer.
I hope I won’t be disappointed.
“It’s 2050, a decade after a heatwave that killed four hundred million across the Persian Gulf, including journalist Marcus Tully’s wife. Now he must uncover the truth: was the disaster natural? Or is the weather now a weapon of genocide?
A whistleblower pulls Tully into a murder investigation at the centre of an election battle for a global dictator, with a mandate to prevent a climate apocalypse. A former US President campaigns against the first AI politician for the position, but someone is trying to sway the outcome.
Tully must convince the world to face the truth and make hard choices about the future of the species. But will humanity ultimately choose salvation over freedom, whatever the cost?
An enthralling murder mystery with a vividly realised future world, forcing readers to grapple with hard hitting questions about the climate crisis, our relationship with Artificial Intelligence and the price we’d be willing to pay, as a species, to be saved. Perfect for fans of Blake Crouch, Harlan Coben, Neal Stephenson, Philip K. Dick, Kim Stanley Robinson and RR Haywood.”
Have you read it? What did you think?
THE LINK OF THE WEEK
An example of a great post for #ParisinJuly2025,
On Ring Roads, by Patrick Modiano
🎧 THE MUSIC OF THE WEEK 🎧
If you need a playlist for #ParisinJuly2025
One out of many
LAST BOOK ADDED TO MY GOODREADS TBR
📚Sirius, by Olaf Stapledon
Classic scifi
1944
188 pages
“Sirius is Thomas Trelone’s great experiment – a huge, handsome dog with the brain and intelligence of a human being.
Raised and educated in Trelone’s own family alongside Plaxy, his youngest daughter, Sirius is a truly remarkable and gifted creature.
His relationship with the Trelones, particularly with Plaxy, is deep and close, and his inquiring mind ranges across the spectrum of human knowledge and experience.
But Sirius isn’t human and the conflicts and inner turmoil that torture him cannot be resolved.”
HAVE YOU READ ANY OF THESE BOOKS?
HOW WAS YOUR WEEK?
BE SURE TO LEAVE THE LINK TO YOUR POST 
But I’d like to highlight the big 
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Words And Peace