Books, Books, Books

Today was a day off for Laurent and Sophie (who is on school vacation). We started the day watching a friendly French-Costa Rican charity football match (proceeds went to Martinique) at 6.45 in the morning. Due to the time difference (10 hours with France), getting up early to get our regular dose of French football and Zizou has become somewhat of a habit.

After a few errands and a lunch of lemon chicken (yes, I actually manage to cook once in a while), I whisked Laurent and Sophie off to the beach so that I could get some work done for Paris.

But the best find of the day? An English-language lending library in Noumea's Latin Quarter. Another local Anglophone - check out JD Riso's blog at http://jdriso.blogspot.com/ - had found my blog and tipped me off about a new lending library in Noumea. Yesterday I stopped into this little hidden away, underground-feeling place and spoke to my first local Anglophone since arriving here some three months ago. Books abound - ranging from beach reading to good literature to children's books to videos in English. I had just been getting ready earlier in the week to place an order with Amazon (one can never have too much to read - and finding English books here is both next to impossible and prohibitively expensive). I had caught up on all my recent New Yorkers and was coming to the end of the pile on my nightstand. So to walk away with a whole new free book (Anne Tyler's Back When We Were Grownups to contrast with my nightstand pile of current reads: Margaret Heffernan's The Naked Truth and Jason Burke's Al-Qaeda) added to the fabric of life, and the daily pleasure one finds, on a tiny island in the South Pacific.