Like Cole Porter, I love Paris in the springtime, the fall and any other season you care to mention. In fact, the only occasions when I haven't loved Paris have involved taking certain underground journeys from the Metro in Montparnasse, because these necessitate spending an eternity on a horizontally moving travelator in the bowels of the earth. I really hate that travelator, which rightly belongs in Dante's Inferno, and until this week I couldn't imagine anyone who wouldn't.
Then a couple of days ago Phoenix House sent me an elegant little hardback called The Pleasures of Life written by Philippe Delerm, and among the thirty-four brief essays rhapsodising about les plaisirs minuscules de la vie is one extolling the virtues of this very travelator.
"Out in front," he observes, "those in a real hurry get into top gear by taking extra-long strides. But it's far more pleasurable to remain an observer, one hand resting lightly on the moving black banister."
"Caught in static flight," he dreamily concludes, "you become a character in a Magritte painting: an image of urban banality on an endless conveyor belt, gliding past fleeting mirror images of yourself."
Hmm, all very French, and perhaps I'd be more convinced if I were reading it in its French original. Yet these thirty-four gently philosophical slivers (taking in such subjects as a croissant in the street, the motorway at night, the first sip of beer, reading on the beach, and Sunday evenings) do exert their own charm - as 700,000 French enthusiasts proved when they catapulted the book into the best-seller lists last year.
If you're stuck for a Christmas present idea, it makes an intriguing stocking-filler for a mere £5.99.
THE new issues of Graph and of Poetry Ireland Review are full of interesting things. In the former, for instance, Gerry Dukes casts a beady eye on contemporary Irish fiction, provocatively citing factual errors and inconsistencies in a number of recent novels that strive for realism.
He harps, too, on something that also infuriates me. After observing that fact-checking in English publishing houses has become "as rare as the Latin Mass", he comments: "But, more disturbing still, it would appear that some English editors have lost the ability to read, a skill once deemed necessary for those in the book business." I entirely agree, though he might have added that proof-readers in the same publishing houses have also given up the ghost - witness the misprints that litter most books nowadays.
This issue of Graph also has a thirty-two-page section honouring the memory of the Arts Council's former literature officer Lar Cassidy, whose untimely death occurred last year. Among the contributors are John Banville, Ciaran Benson, Seamus Deane, Michael Kane, Thomas Kinsella, Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney.
Seamus Heaney also features in the new Poetry Ireland Review, which is currently being edited by Catherine Phil MacCarthy. The poetry in this issue is of a particularly high standard, the reviews are lively and occasionally trenchant, and there's a striking section at the beginning in which ten contemporary poets write about a particular poem that was a crucial influence in their life or work.
Thus, Pat Boran writes on Frost's Birches, Vona Groarke commends Yeats's High Talk (pity about the missing line in the reproduced poem), Mary O'Donnell pays tribute to Hopkins's God's Grandeur, while Mark Granier's piece on James Wright's Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota, is so persuasive that it immediately sent me back to this fine American poet, whom I hadn't read in years.
Graph costs £5, Poetry Ireland Review is £5.99. Both are excellent value.
There are as many book launches next week as there were last week, and here are just a few of them.
In Waterstone's at 6pm on Tuesday, RTE's Charlie Bird will be celebrating the publication of Breaking the Bank, an account of the exclusive story that recently won for himself and George Lee Journalists of the Year in the ESB National Media Awards.
On Wednesday in the same venue at the same time, the distinguished poet and publisher Michael Schmidt will discuss his new book, Lives of the Poets, with Irish poet Dennis O'Driscoll, while on Thursday at 6.30pm in the Royal College of Surgeons, eminent historians John Keegan and Niall Ferguson will be talking about their latest books - Keegan's The First World War and Ferguson's The Pity of War.