I’m just back from Paris, so I have to admit I don’t have much to say on the professional front, other than that RED and all its derivatives–from pink to orange to blood red–are in.

Luckily I had packed some orange, and I did buy a new red dress while I was there. That’s me in orange in the photo above making pizza montagnarde in our Paris kitchen. (For the foodies out there, that’s a pizza with crème fraiche, caramelized onions, thinly sliced potatoes, kalamata olives, and chunks of creamy reblochon or vacherin, which is in season now. To die for.)

I did some book shopping in Paris for recent winners of the prestigious Prix Goncourt and am finishing up one of them, called Syngue sabour: Pierre de patience (available in English as The Patience Stone) by Atiq Rahimi. It won the Goncourt in 2008 and is about a woman in Afghanistan caring for her gravely wounded husband, who is in a coma after a brutal fight. It’s a very dark story about war and about women in Afghanistan, and it has a grisly ending. (I skipped ahead.)

I didn’t see any e-book readers overseas so it seems they haven’t caught on yet, at least in France. People still seem to love their print books, carrying them everywhere. It’s hard to miss that every third Parisian on the metro is reading a book and that book reviews take up a big part of the daily newspaper, often the front page.

I love the specialization of bookstores in Paris. You want a graphic novel? Well, you go to one of the city’s many neighborhood graphic novel bookstores. A Russian novel? Head down the street to the local Russian bookstore. Total niche marketing, and these bookstores seem to thrive. Paris is a book lover’s paradise, that’s for sure!

Check in for more from TFCB in two weeks!