A Feast of Foreign Climes

British author Ann Bridge (1889-1974) wrote a passel of novels based on her travels around the world. She also wrote a series of entertaining mysteries featuring Julia Probyn, intrepid journalist and part-time spy for British Intelligence. The first in that series, The Lighthearted Quest, took Ms. Probyn to Morocco. 

The time span in the Probyn mysteries covers the years 1956 to 1972 - a time of civilized travel - and the stories take the reader to foreign locales including Portugal, Switzerland, and Ireland. 

I bring this up because today Amazon has all eight of the Kindle editions of the mysteries published by Bloomsbury Reader (as well as other classic ones by Edmund Crispin, Margery Allingham and Nicolas Freeling) on sale for $1.99 each. I paid $7 for the first one in January 2012 when I was introduced to this globe-trotting heroine. So now it looks like I can get the remaining seven for only twice that much!

Ms. Probyn's adventures in North Africa led me to Edith Wharton's In Morocco, an account of her time spent there after World War I. Wharton stayed in the Bahia Palace, a fact mentioned in Ms. Probyn's tale. 

A case of one book leading to another, or in this case, many others.

Pinball Reader

Reading is so much like playing a fast game of pinball. Flip the flapper and ding! ding! another book comes into play. For example, let's take Edith Wharton who has been making appearances on book blogs recently in celebration of the 150th anniversary of her birth.

I started out the year reading her French Ways and Their Meaning written in Paris in 1919. After WWI was over, Wharton traveled in Morocco as the guest of the first French resident general, Hubert Lyautey and his wife. Wharton stayed in their home in Marrakesh, the Bahai Palace which was built in the late 1800s. This palace and the fact that Ms. Wharton stayed there is mentioned in the book A Lighthearted Quest by Ann Bridge which I recently finished.

That mention led me to see if Wharton had written anything about her travels in Morocco. She had and cleverly named the book In Morocco. I just now downloaded it onto my Nook for free.

See what I mean. Ding!Ding!

Into a Paris Quartier

Read all day. In one sitting finished Into a Paris Quartier by Diane Johnson. Another in the National Geographic series.

What I learned was that Edith Wharton lived at 54 rue de Varenne and that is where she wrote French Ways and Their Meanings (which I just finished yesterday). I must have walked past her apartment in September 2010 many times as I stayed for a week at the Hotel De Varenne, on rue de Bourgogne, just around the corner. Johnson refers to Wharton's book which she wrote as an explanation of the French to the American soldiers stationed in and around Paris in World War One.

Johnson lives in the St.Germain-de-Pres area on the Left Bank. As of the 2005 publication date of the book, she lives in Paris for six months and in San Francisco for the rest of the year.

Good news. Downton Abbey Season Two begins tonight on PBS. I don't have a television but can watch episodes on my laptop. I rented the DVD of season one and was enchanted. And lustful for that way of life. Who wouldn't be? And now have rewatched the season on PBS. I even took the quiz as to which character I most resembled: Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham, of course.  Dame Maggie Smith gets all the best lines.

Plummy.