Okay, it’s not true — but it feels that way sometimes.

I love Paris and can’t imagine living anywhere else, but I crave English-language bookshops. I dream about them: stuffed to the rafters, esoteric, carefully chosen, Daniel Steele/John Grisham forbidden on pain of death…they’ll even have that biography of Keats (the corrected edition) and oh, where’s my list?!?

I’m salivating. Sorry.

So, to ease the pain, I’ve been trawling the web in search of well-written, well-thought-out blogs by people who read. My blog is a scattered mess, added to only when I have a spare second. These people’s blogs are what mine aspires to.

So Many Books (I’ve been reading this one for ages. Magnificent!)

Chekhov’s Mistress

NovelWorld

***Find of the month (thank you Chekhov’s Mistress!): Zbigniew Herbert

Another irreplaceable, old-school travel writer gone.

Here’s a bit of audio with couple of short snippets of interviews with Eric Newby and his wife Wanda short article with a great photo and the official Guardian obit.

What can I say, three youngish people join the UN. Rwanda, Bosnia, Haiti, Liberia. The chapters alternate between the first person accounts of the three authors. There is a lot of mutual congratulation. The doctor was the one I admired. Interestingly, though, all three quit after a number of years. The doctor understandably burnt out.

Now, I feel I’m treading on dangerous ground here as this is non-fiction. But I found two of the authors’ motives a little unsettling. Postlewait seemed to have joined because she was bored with her life and needed a good paying job. She spends a lot of time drinking, taking drugs, going to parties and sleeping with everyone. Sometimes her parts of the book seem like a diary of a sex tourist. Cain is a Harvard law graduate convinced that America will enlighten, liberate and generally save the world. For all that he went through, he seems to have come out of it only slightly shaken and still remarkably naive.

I’m going to stop there. I don’t regret reading it, because it certainly was a small window into a world I didn’t know much about — i.e.: a glimpse of how the UN functions on an everyday basis.

Related:

If you have Real Player, you can listen to an interview with the authors.

Here’s an interesting essay entitled “Dereliction express” by Roger Sandall on the problem of philanthropy and corruption in Africa.

I heartily recommend the movie Constant Gardener. (It’s based on the book by le Carré. Interestingly, I found the film better than the book — it’s almost always the other way around.) This is a work of fiction, but as the author said, what he found in research was a lot worse than the story he came up with.

And if you’re just overwhelmed by all the suffering in the world and are tired of feeling helpless, consider helping Doctors Without Borders. They have some pretty painless monthly automatic contribution plans starting at $7.50 a month. They’re “an independent international medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural or man-made disasters, or exclusion from health care in more than 70 countries.”