One Plus One by JoJo Moyes

I got an "advance review copy (ARC)" of this novel, which is not due to be published until July.

I have to say that I just loved it.  It's partly that it's a very well-structed romantic comedy.

But very much more than that, it's the authorial voice which is thoughtful, not glib, not too highfalutin and to me, terribly witty.  To me, there's something so satisfying about that witty voice.

JoJo Moyes is also the author of Me Before You and the Girl You Left Behind, which were very popular in 2013.  I haven't read either of them - there are so many things I want to read.  But having this ARC copy made it convenient and it's almost true that once I started I couldn't put it down.  I didn't really care about the characters until chapter three.  But then, I felt, as one does - that I just HAD TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO THEM IN THE END.

Jess is a cleaner.  Actually she has two jobs.  One is being a bartender in a pub, and the other is cleaning houses.

She married her high school boyfriend when she got pregnant at 17.  A few years later, she learned that he had already fathered another child with another woman at the time of their marriage.  She learned this because her husband, fearful of the child's mother's addiction, asked to take this child into their home.

They struggled greatly to make ends meet.  Her husband's get rich quick - or get rich slowly - schemes not only did not succeed, but backfired so that they were never able to secure any financial security and he became depressed.  He stopped working, took to his bed, and eventually moved back in with his mother.

Jess works a lot of hours at her two jobs.  Her elder child, Nicky, is regularly beat up because he's different; her younger child, Tanzie (short for Costanza) is a gifted child who loves mathematics.  She wants to protect her son and doesn't know how and she wants to provide academic opporunities for her daughter and she has no idea how to do that, either.

She's desperate, it's true, but she's also someone with an almost unbeatable case of optimism who's so fond of reassuring her children that they think it's funny that she always says that everything will be all right although it never has been to date.

How Paris Became Paris by Joan DeJean

I wasn't able to finish this book because I simply didn't have time; it had to go back to the library because, not surprisingly, someone else wanted to read it.

Therefore, I can only talk about the author's main contention and the first three chapters.  The book begins with a 20-page introduction in which the author explains that the Paris we know today, and the idea of Paris as the ultimate tourist destination, the city of light, the city of romance, all start with Henri IV's desire to use a building program to restore Paris after it was greatly damaged by decades of religious war in the 16th century.

I should note that when I first had a desire to read this book I assumed it was about Baron Hausmann's work in the 19th century.  In her introduction, DeJean explains that it is an erroneous view held by many that Baron Hausmann's transformed Paris from its medieval version but it is the work of the 17th century kings, financiers, and engineering boy wonders that transformed Paris and gave us the Pont Neuf, the Place des Vosges (then the Place Royale), and the Ile Saint Louis (then the Ile Notre Dame, named for its proximity to the Notre Dame on the Ile de la Cite).

Henri IV's work began with his decision, around the turn of the 17th century, to build the Pont Neuf.  He was, among other things, concerned about creating infrastructure capable of holding the weight of carriages, the coming fashion in transportation.  The new bridge was completed in 1609, and it was different from the other bridges then being used for many reasons.  It was not lined with buildings as London Bridge and many other bridges were.  Henri IV financed it not with rents from these buildings but from a tax on wine coming into the city.  This bridge had broad, raised sidewalks for pedestrians, making crossing the bridge safer for them as carriages became more popular.  The bridge was unusually wide, 75 feet, which made it possible for merchants, performers, and gossipers to congregate on the bridge which made quickly made it most important gathering place to pick up news.

The Place des Vosges began as a silk workshop.  I loved learning about this.  Henri IV inherited an economically depressed city in which aristocrats were buying Italian silk for their dress, an expensive practice which did nothing for France's economy.  He resolved to create a silk industry in France and set up a workshop, with houses for the workers, on the old site of the Palace des Tournelles (which had been pulled down by Catherine de Medici after Henri III had been fatally injured in a joust there).  He decreed that the houses should have regular fronts, and the square was originally built with housing on three sides and a silk workshop on the fourth.  After Henri IV's death, his son did not pursue the project, which ended.  The silk workshop became (I don't know if it was converted or pulled down) the fourth wall of housing facing the square.  After some decades, the tradesmen who had lived there were replaced by aristocrats.  Eventually, the Place des Vosges became the centerpiece of an affluent, desirable neighborhood called The Marais ("the marshes").  As its name suggests, much of this area, and much of the area on the right bank, was not developed at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

I can't remember why the Ile St. Louis was undertaken, but it was created from two other islands that already stood in the Seine:  the Isle de Juifs and Isle de Vaches.  Both islands were uninhabited and primarily used for grazing.  An engineer named Marie, for whom one of the adjoining bridges is named, transformed the two islands into one.  The island was buttressed with embankments.  Innovatively, the street pattern was laid out in a grid.  DeJean writes that the architecture of the houses built on the Ile Saint Louis influenced French architecture in and outside of Paris.  Two great mansions were built on one end of the island; Baron Hausmann pulled the largest, the Hotel de Bretonvilliers, down to build the Pont Sully.  There is an arch left which I think gives an indication of the beauty of the the building, which I suppose was really more like a complex.  This is the style, smooth cut stone construction, which became our very idea of what is French architecture.

Let me go back to the Pont Neuf for a moment.  The bridge was built with observation platforms; DeJean said that this was a new innovation (and it has continued since I saw a couple of observation platforms on Blackfriars Bridge the other day).  De Jean says that this was the beginning of the mystique of Paris; people enjoyed stopping to view the Seine from the unique vantage point provided by the bridge and thus began an interest in urban views.  She points out that the Pont Neuf was the first piece of urban infrastructure that was neither a palace, fortress or monument that attracted tourists.   She sees it as the beginning of modern urban design, in which infrastructure itself may become a tourist attraction.

I know that later chapters of the book deal with other 17th century residential squares, the the design of the Tuileries and the Champs d'Elysee, and the civil unrest that took place in the middle of the 17th century.

It is especially interesting to me to read a consideration of the "beginning" of the romanticization of Paris as, coincidentally, just before I started this book I learned of "Paris Syndrome" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome) which is thought to be similar to Stendhal, or Florence, Syndrome.  Fortunately, Joan deJean's elucidation of the history of Paris is not going to cause anyone to experience Paris Syndrome.

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

Loved this book.

It reads like the novelization of your favorite romantic comedy.

It's a cross between The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and The Accidental Tourist.

I understand that it has already been optioned as a film, and that it began its life as a screenplay.

I just read the New York Times review today and the NYT reviewer compared it unfavorably to The Curious Incident; there, the reviewer opined, one was not dependent on observations made by the protagonist but could infer social cues and other information not provided by the protagonist by reading the dialogue.  It's a been a few years since I read Mark Haddon's book; my recollection was that as the book wore on, especially as it came to its conclusion, it became more and more contrived.  Nevertheless, that "shapeliness" is probably part of why it was so popular.

It's probably also a little slighter than The Accidental Tourist, if only because the latter book deals with grief and loss, and there, the love object lady was more problematic, and so, probably more interesting:  not the same class as Mason, the writer of the Accidental Tourist series, not educated, with the unfortunate name "Miriam," and an equally unfortunate dress sense, and a child who was struggling.  Anne Tyler is a resolutely hopeful writer and she manages to talk about dreadful disappointments in a poetic way and makes you believe that a happy ending is possible.