Paris, 31 January 2024

Tomorrow I should send my manuscript to the publisher.

There is nothing better than reading while eating. Or vice versa.

The best way to read is with your feet up (Calvino).

I’ve just opened Dwight Garner’s book (FSG 2023) The Upstairs Delicatessen: Eating, Reading…

He’s talking about how he made the food not run out before he had finished the reading material he had amassed after school on the living room carpet before he headed to the kitchen for the food: sandwich w/mayo, lots of it, potato chips/crisps, pretzels, a cold drink made with red powder. I haven’t got to what happens to the carpet yet.

Reading at table was verboten where I grew up, but still engaged in if one was alone, and yes, anything would do as reading material, whatever magazines were lying around…well broken-in novels (they would lie flat on the table) from another generation of childhoods (Little Women…), cereal boxes.

I still thinking heaven is reading and eating at the same time.

Dwight Garner is a New York Times book critic. I feel I’m going to gobble his book up.