Oil on cardboard – 8 x 8 inch – Unique work

I love reading. It is a fact. I’ve been reading since I was little. Well, since I could read!

What if, by any chance, I was asked what books I would take to a desert island… My answer has been there, ready-made for years! In reading order, at the age of 18, I discovered L’Atlantide by Pierre Benoit, which my father recommended to me. I read it in a weekend. Which never happens to me because I read very slowly. I enjoy, I taste… Years later, I wanted to reread it. A very very very bad idea. I didn’t get past halfway through the novel.

My second one is a thriller, still under the reading advice of my father. It is called la Nuit des enfants rois by Bernard Lenteric. I was 21 years old. I remember it like it was yesterday. I finished the book sitting on the bathroom floor waiting for a washing machine to finish. It’s a memory that cannot be made up. It’s so uninspiring. But it feels good, it reassures, it brings humanity to everyday life.

My last and favorite: Consuelo, la Comtesse de Rudolstadt by George Sand. George Sand is my favorite writer since La Mare au Diable and La petite fadette, the books I read when I was 10. I no longer know how or why I opened Consuelo. I had trouble finding it. A library in a neighboring town had it, I had difficulty obtaining proof of address to be able to borrow the three volumes of this story…. Actually, I will spare you the details of a complicated family.

Each time I dove into reading this novel, I was on my balcony comfortably seated in my Ikéa Poang armchair, a little music that I love, not to name it, my favorite singer Étienne Daho, and I entered in another world. The world of the 18th century combining emancipation and freedom. I was 32!

It is still MY book today. I wanted to buy it for years but never manage to find it. It was no longer published. And then this Christmas my daughter offered it to me… A book that must necessarily be in one of the second-hand booksellers along the Seine. A little box of wonders under the care of talented people passionate about literature. A Parisian curiosity that is certainly worth the detour!