School Books and Bookstores

Here are some of the books that Silke will be studying this year in French.

Silke did animal farm with Mrs. Agopian last year.  That will allow her to concentrate on expressing her thoughts in French this year.

For anyone who laments the demise of the bookstore in Canada, Paris is quite a revelation.  I had a list of books to buy, and the first place we tried was Les Halles, which is a pretty huge and posh underground mall in the centre of Paris.  We went there because I had noticed previously that the department store Fnac has a whole floor which is a bookstore.  It was huge, and crowded, but not quite right.  A little too fancy - it didn't seem like there were a lot of families looking for school books.  But I had remembered a Librarie d'Education on Boulevard Saint-Michel, so we left Les Halles and crossed Pont au Change to rive gauche.  We hadn't gone a block from the Seine when just came across a bookstore, Gilbert Joseph.  They even had what were obviously school books in their sidewalk display.  We went in and the place was huge.  6 floors and a basement!  Further, the books were packed in tight, more like a library, with shelving everywhere and all the books spine out, rather than cover out.  It took us a little while, and some asking, to figure out how to find anything, but I'm sure they must have pretty much anything there.  That's so amazing, that you just walk down a street almost at random and find a bookstore like that!