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I’m posting this out of frustration with the bland, dated advice in yesterday’s New York Times Travel section. A couple celebrating their 25th anniversary plans to spend a few days in Chicago in early December. What to do, where to go? Agreed. It will be cold. Let’s review the reasons to visit Chicago any time

My friend Margaret rates restaurants the same way I do: foremost, delicious food that’s authentic or inventive. After that, a memorable dining experience comes from setting, tables, chairs, spacing, service, plating, pacing, linens and silverware, noise, lighting, crowd, attitude, cost. Grub to gourmet, there’s more to dining than food. When Margaret declared The Purple Pig

What to read after Jonathan Franzen’s luminous, full-bodied “Freedom?” I tried one of Franzen’s favorites, Paula Fox’s “Desperate Characters” (1970) but found it episodic and curiously unsatisfying I picked up Malamud’s “The Assistant” (1957). Its first sentence sets the inviting but grim tone: “The early November street was dark though night had ended…” By the

Never mind Oprah’s endorsement: buy, borrow, beg, steal Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom.” I have a pre-Oprah copy that’s making its way through my household; my teenage son is reading it, my husband has next dibs, my college-age son is visiting this weekend. We’ll have to hide it from him. Does it matter that it’s become an

Can a book beat you up? I’ll carry the psychic bruises from John Updike’s “Rabbit, Redux” for a long, long time. I’m not complaining! I’d rather go for a wild ride than slog through some of the fiction I waded into this summer. I brought a stack to my favorite reading spot, a dock beside

From all the press I’d read, I felt certain I was going to walk into a market of French foods. Instead, this market is global, with 30 local vendors putting out native produce, Vietnamese sandwiches, Mexican fare, Polish sausage, Italian coffee, exotic pastas, fish and meat, French pastries, artisan soaps, cut flowers, crepes — and

Quite a ways into this story, someone at a party asks Emma how she met Dex. “We grew up together.” Their growing up and getting old (er) after university is the story of this charming book, which is laugh-out-loud funny and, at times, gut-wrenchingly sad. It’s not so much chick lit as Jane Austen on

My friend Jennifer and I beat the heat the other day and ducked in to a movie theater for a matinee. We’d both read tantalizing reviews of “I am Love” and couldn’t wait to see it. We weren’t disappointed. Movies like this don’t get made any more: beautifully filmed, slowly told, it was like watching

My 17 -year-old son read Virgil’s “Aeneid” this year at school. I couldn’t hide my envy: to be so advanced in the study of Latin that he and his classmates could read that ancient tale of arms and men. What a gift their hard work brought them! During the year, two works of fiction were

Dan Chaon’s “Await Your Reply” (2009) is a beautifully told and highly compelling tale about identity: losing one, stealing others, gaining another (and another, and another). It’s rare that I finish a book and want to start reading it again, to figure out how the author pulled off such a clever feat of storytelling. This

With less than a week in Paris, we foodies needed to plan our meals well. Haute cuisine, “le fooding,” brasseries, bistros, Middle Eastern, Moroccan: how to get a taste of it all? We didn’t, but here’s three we’d go to again: Gaya par Pierre Gagnaire (44, rue du Bac). Don’t be put off by Gagnaire’s

Six of us went to Paris last week to eat and shop and look at art. We had no trouble (volcanic ash) coming or going, and while we certainly didn’t plan to benefit from other travelers’ canceled plans, we found it easy to nab reservations at top restaurants, and lines at museums were remarkably short.

Some tales could only come to life — and make sense — in a particular time and place. In I.B. Singer’s “Enemies, A Love Story” Jewish refugee Herman Broder makes a home in Coney Island with his pregnant wife Yadwiga, who’s a Gentile. In the Bronx, he keeps his ravishing mistress, Masha, and her devout

Why do we read books that puzzle and confound? Earlier this week I was fortunate to join in a book club’s discussion of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. I hadn’t talked about a difficult read, at length, with a group of smart, educated women since I was in college. Such interesting talking points: Does it matter if

More book grief. Zachary Mason’s “The Lost Books of the Odyssey” is that rare thing: a retelling of a classic that holds you in its grip just as the original did. Will Odysseus survive the war? Will he finally return home to Ithaca? Will Penelope be waiting? Mason offers alternate tellings and endings for the

Can a book be grieved? It’s not a person, after all, or a beloved pet, or a plant you’ve cared for and coaxed into bloom each spring. It’s a book. I’ve said before that books are like lovers. Private companions. We take them to bed, tuck them into our bags, panic (as I did) when

It’s a rare treat to see the life’s work — or much of it — of a living artist. Photographer William Eggleston (b. 1939) has been a quiet sensation since 1976, when his color photographs were the first ever to be shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Before that, color photography was the

Finishing her umpteenth young-adult novel set during World War II, my ten-year old daughter pranced around the kitchen: “I llllllove the Holocaust.” I choked on my coffee. “You mean, the literature of the Holocaust. Hitler, the Nazis. The ultimate bad guys.” Alex agreed, then told me all about a Danish girl sent by her grandmother

With friends and family griping about the dearth of good new reads, it’s worth a look back at the best of the last decade. That’s always my default: Nothing new? Look back. Explains reading all of Hardy, and Richard Yates, repeatedly. Of course, the last decade gave us the me me me “Eat, Pray, Love”

When I began this blog, I made a choice to write about books and art and cities and food I admire. Too easy to pick on the second rate! But as a new decade dawned, and “best of” lists spawned, I couldn’t help thinking about the piles of books in my home and office, books