As I said in a previous post, I've decided to devote a couple of months to the study of French, with the prospect of visiting my friend in Nice for her birthday. With that in mind, I started rereading a French novel that struck a chord with me in my twenties. However, feeling rather tired of e-books, last Tuesday I decided to pop into a second-hand bookstore that had caught my eye some time ago. I was hoping to find a book by one of my favorite novelists, say Robbe-Grillet, Modiano—but I told myself that even a French translation of a Japanese or Chinese author that looked interesting would do.

Unfortunately, the narrative stock they had in French was rather poor, so I ended up buying an old pocket edition of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut, another of my all-time favorites. OK, let's have a few days of good laughs with Mr. Rosewater, and then go back to French.