Many years ago I subscribed to a dictionary called Tresors de la Langue Francaise, and over years, received 11 volumes (A-Nat), and then I decided to stop receiving it. Perhaps the internet was by then making dictionaries and encyclopedias redundant. The TLF is edited by the CNRS, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and it was, at the time, novel, because it was being prepared by computer and it was about the language of the 19th and 20th centuries. All 11 volumes sit at the bottom of a floor-ceiling bookshelf, and I want to give them away, but of course no one wants them. I stop in to used and antique book sellers and they refuse; I connect academic friends in French departments but no, sorry, they don't know anyone who...

Today I was volunteering at 'my' soup kitchen and I asked my fellow volunteers as we sat around eating our lunch after serving lunch whether there was anything like Craig's List or Nextdoor. Oh, yes, they said, there's 'Le Bon Coin' (leboncoin), literally 'the good corner' or, let's see, what would we say in California English--a good little place? No, there's bound to be a better translation than that but it will do for now. Anyhow, long story short, I took some pictures of my ('condition: new') row of dictionaries and posted an ad. Maybe an art student could make some kind of sculpture using the pages, or a furniture designer could turn them into a coffee table.

I'm in need of a book to read. Finished Anna Karenina 10 days ago. Am still reading Woolf's Journals, but I've reached 1940 and the Blitz, and I'm not sure I want to read to the end. I continue to read Bonnefoy's Inachevable; Entretiens sur la poésie; I finished La Mennulara, which was wonderful and went to Tour de Babel, the lovely Italian bookshop in the Marais, and bought another book by Simonetta Agnello Hornby, which I am just beginning to read. I just ran my eyes over my bookshelf and didn't see anything that immediately caught my eye. There's a lot of Dostoyevsky I've never read to the end, but no, not Dostoyevsky. Elizabeth Bowen? I did pull all of Lawrence Durrell (still with cash register receipt from Montreal inside of one) off the shelf and decide to take it to the English Used Books down the street on Rue Monsieur Leprince and trade them in for something else--maybe a Donna Leon?

Beverley Bie Brahic