I loved this book as a young woman dreaming of being a writer, shut up in my garret pouring out my soul on paper and smoking exotic cigarettes with thin young men wearing black turtlenecks. (Maybe that's more Berlin than Paris, but what did I know?)

Hemingway, of course, is much more no-nonsense than that, but I still loved his memoir and the way it made all my dreams about the writing life seem real if impossibly remote for a midwestern gal like me.

Now, of course, I'm a middle-aged pen-for-hire, with considerably fewer illusions about the life of authors, but I still love this book. Its short chapters are easy to read a bit at a time, even to skip around in, and you leave them with just a faint whiff of that romantic Parisian cafe air still lingering in your living room. (Gauloises optional . . .)