If you can't jet off to Paris on a moment's notice, the next best thing is curling up in a comfy chair with some pain au chocolat, a café crème, and a good book about the City of Light. Here are three of my favorites.
Eleanor Brown
My high school had a forward-thinking English department, which meant I read Isabel Allende, but not Ernest Hemingway, and I'll freely admit I didn't get around to him until I was researching Jazz Age Paris in order to write my own "Paris book."
Even if you can't bear Hemingway as a person (more on that in a moment), A Moveable Feast is a must-read. It's a memoir, certainly, but it's also a love letter to a Paris gone by, with horse-drawn wagons in the streets and everyone sending each other a pneu - a letter delivered via Paris's pneumatic postal system, which sounds infinitely more charming than texting someone an eggplant emoji.
After you've read A Moveable Feast and utterly fallen in love with Hemingway, it's only fair to follow it with Paula McLain's gorgeous, heart-rending story of his first wife, Hadley, in The Paris Wife. You'll fall out of love with Hemingway, whose boorish behavior is on full display here (I may have tweeted, while reading this novel, that I wanted to punch Hemingway in the neck), but you'll just love seeing that same Paris through Hadley's eyes.
Paula is a poet by training, and her descriptions of the city are pure Hemingway with a Hadley/Paula twist: "It was our favorite part of the day, this in-between time, and it always seemed to last longer than it should - a magic and lavender space unpinned from the hours around it, between worlds." A magic and lavender space - how can you not love that?
Leaping from the 1920s to the 2000s, Pamela Druckerman's bestselling Bringing Up Bébé is ostensibly a parenting manual, but it's also a delicious insight into the way Parisians live. When I read this book, I imagined myself living in Paris like Pamela, having dinner parties with my French friends in their elegant Paris appartements. I imagined my children and how I would of course raise them like little French bébés, independent and polite and curious. Other parents would marvel at my children's willingness to eat things other than chicken fingers and grilled cheese. "We're raising them to be Parisian," I would say, flipping the ends of the scarf I would have tied elegantly around my neck at all times.
I don't have children and mostly my scarves look like they landed around my neck by accident, but this is irrelevant. When we read about Paris, we want the dream, we want to be our perfect selves. In some ways reading about Paris is even better than actually going - there are no lines, no snooty waiters, no selfie sticks - just chatting with Hadley at a café, walking the streets with Hemingway, or the most elegant dinner party you've ever attended. Perfect.
Eleanor Brown is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Weird Sisters. Her new novel, The Light of Paris published by The Borough Press is out now.