Welcome to our annual summer reading poll! (And if you want more recommendations, see fall, winter and spring).
Author birthdays this weekend: Jean de La Fontaine, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross on Saturday; Ann Radcliffe, Barbara Cartland, Oliver Sacks on Sunday.
The poll: please recommend a great book to add to our summer reading lists, and tell us what fragrance we should wear while reading it.
My recent reading…
Welcome to our 4th annual spring reading poll! Please recommend a great book to add to our reading lists, and tell us what fragrance we should wear while reading it.
(Or, as always, just talk about something else.)
What I’ve read since our winter reading poll:
Starting with fiction…
A hot summer’s night in 1838 at…Nohant, the setting of…famous and decadent late-night parties where all of Paris’s intellectuals and artists throng: Alfred de Musset, Franz Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Eugène Delacroix. Inveterate night owls, George Sand and her lover…Frédéric Chopin, stroll languorously through the gardens till dawn. The air is saturated by the opulent trail of the novelist’s sumptuous perfume. — Astier de Villatte
That’s the description of Les Nuits, one of three perfumes in Astier de Villatte’s new Trois Parfums Historiques collection; the other two are Le Dieu Bleu (representing Ancient Egypt) and Artaban (giving us a sniff of Ancient Rome). After a lifetime of MAJOR perfume mistakes (blind buys) and disappointments (blind buys), I was STILL ready to buy Les Nuits without smelling it first — could this fragrance bring me closer to one of my idols, George Sand? I’m a perfect example that “live and learn” is a hope, not a certainty…
Welcome to our annual winter reading poll! Tell us about a great book to curl up with on a frosty winter night, and what fragrance we should wear while reading it. (Or, do what I do and record here everything you have read since the last reading poll. And if you want more recommendations, scrolling through the literature tag will bring up all the older reading polls.)
My recent reading:
I finished Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, which I started in the summer of 2020 and then set aside for a very long time…
PSA: the splitmeet will start next Saturday, on the 22nd.
Meanwhile, please recommend a great book to add to our fall reading lists, and tell us what fragrance we should wear while reading it.
Or, as always, just talk about something else.
I read an awful lot this quarter, partly because I was ill for a good chunk of it…