I really loved a lot of this book. 90s French cultural references went over my head but many of the ideas about French and American culture still ring true today. Makes me want to go there

My favorite quote from Martha, the author's wife, "In Paris we have a beautiful existence but not a full life, and in New York we have a full life but an unbeautiful existence." I agree!

If you want to know what it would be like to live in Paris for a year (with your spouse and young child), this is a good read. It reveals some funny and interesting differences between French and American cultures.

i don't even know where to begin, there are so many infuriating moments in this book. maybe i am biased having lived in paris for three years myself, but gopnik's paris is no paris i know. despite frequently catagorizing himself and his experience in paris as middle class, the very fact that he lives near the boulevard st germain disqualifies him. add to that his hobnobbing with 'fashionable' people and expensive brunches and you have what amounts to a series of cliché-affirming assumptions about paris based on a new yorker's sentimentality. what really infuriates me is his ability to botch a very intelligent observation about paris administrative life with a horrible metaphor involving an american figure like tom delay or kenneth starr. he knows a great deal about political machinations and i'm sure he's very astute when it comes to developing essays for the new yorker, but in this context his observations seem irrelevant and smack of navel gazing . i would hardly classify this as 'the finest book on paris in recent years' as a new york times book reviewer did.

Adam Gopnik is by far my favorite writer for the New Yorker Magazine, which makes him my favorite magazine writer for any American magazine. Yet I've never read anything better from him than the delightful "Paris to the Moon."

Many a memoirist could learn from his voice here. No question in my mind and heart, Gopnik writes as himself, unaffected, curious, nerdy, witty, and as smart as approximately 7.9 normal human beings combined. (Joke. I can't begin to assign a numerical value to his amazing sensibility.)

Especially cherished is what I learned about French customs for speaking to a female child in utero. No spoilers from me.

Consider this yet one more reason to read an exemplary memoir by an extraordinarily delightful writer.

Gopnik nails what we love and loathe about France and the French and proves that sometimes those things are the same. I am jealous of his ability to uproot his family and live in France for five years, with some help from a little journal called The New Yorker. Each chapter is devoted to a different element of life in France. He covers everything from working out at a gym to getting a library book to introducing the French to the concept of take-out. Funny, serious and philosophical, Gopnik strikes the right tone throughout.

My favorite passages are those about protest. For the French, this can come in the form of a complete standstill of public transportation or a dine-in by Parisians disappointed in the Americanization of one of their favorite bistros. One woman suggests they all order foie gras so that they can spread their food slowly onto toast and further prolong their meal and their message. Another protest, backed by the support of the government and most citizens, is by students who desire more difficult classes!

Most importantly, Gopnik shows again and again that the French are a people for whom leisure is a way of life and not something to be carved out in brief moments on “le weekend.”

Gopnik spent five years living in Paris with his wife and his small son, writing articles for the New Yorker on life in Paris; this book collects many of those articles along with some of Gopnik's personal journals from that period. I found Paris to the Moon finely written and frequently witty, and I quite liked the mix of personal reminiscence and social and cultural commentary. Though I can see how those expecting a book about Paris might find that there's too much of the former, I thought it was nicely balanced.

There were some clever moments, but overall this read was pretty dry. It's a memoir of a man, his wife, and son living abroad in Paris. They were there a "half decade" the blurb tells us, trying to make it sound more salient than five years, which is a good metaphor for the tone of the book. In more than one chapter/vignette/riff I thought, “who gives a crap?” This is less a story than a collection of essays, which is how the book started. I didn’t really learn anything, I didn’t get a sense of what it might be like to live a “half decade” in Paris. It did confirm that soccer is a totally lame sport, which I already knew. That’s about what I got out of it.

This book had its moments, but ultimately it was a DNF for me. A much better choice for English speakers is one of Jean-Benoit Nadeau's books about France and the French language, or one of Graham Robb's quirky historical takes on France. Gopnik's book just never grabbed me, and I love France.

Gopnick's first visit to Paris was in 1973 while his parents, both university professors, were on sabbatical. On his first night he had the best meal he had ever eaten and immediately fell in love with the city. He returned several times in the following years with his wife Martha and in 1994 when their son Luke was born, they decided to move there. Both had careers which allowed them to travel, Martha as a screen writer and Gopnick as a columnist for the New Yorker. During that period he wrote a series of essays about his fascinating life in “The City of Lights” and they serve as the basis for the book.

This is an interesting combination of memoir and travelogue written by an astute and intelligent writer who shares his experiences living in a city with a culture, a cuisine and a way of life very different from what he had experienced living in New York City. As a young parent living and working in Paris, his work provides a different perspective than that of a tourist, who after a short visit, comments on the food, the landmarks and how and why Paris is so different from New York.

Many of Gopnick’s thoughts and observations come from the numerous details he had to decide on when he established his family there. It was not just finding an apartment that was affordable, but experiencing the way his family's life was affected when they immersed themselves in the Parisian culture and way of life. He describes everything from choosing what coffee to buy, where to get his hair cut to sorting out the vast number of plugs, voltages and battery types so his fax machine would work. It is through his experience with these simple things of everyday life that Gopnick gives readers a real sense of this fascinating city.

He shares his observations on a number of varied subjects including the superiority of the “prix fixe” menu in the small bistros; the sexy lingerie ads that adorn the boulevards; the charm of the aging carousel in the Luxenbourg Gardens; the interesting rites of Paris haute couture and how daily conversations focus on the incompetence of government ministers and not on sports. There is also an interesting explanation of why one café is considered chic, while another is not.

Gopnick also explores a number of long held perceptions about Paris, including the concept of what Americans consider “French rudeness” and what the French think of as “American arrogance". He includes a humourous explanation of the idea of the “erreur distant”, a belief by the French that all errors are caused by something far way that has nothing to do with them and a common signal given whenever they run out of arguments for why something is wrong or isn’t working.
And always, he includes his frustrating and endless entanglements with the French bureaucracy which he explains is just a necessary part of French life everyone must cope with, but which can weigh you down and sometimes bury you.

In summing up his experience, Gopnick says, “Everything about moving to Paris was wonderful and everything about emigrating to France was difficult”. It is a wonderful summative statement of the five years he spent there!

It was like reading the New Yorker - some chapters were exhilarating and others were black-hole boredom. The lingo was that of a pompous New York writer, constantly referring and comparing emotions/anything to literary writers or the emotions/anything that those literary writers had on Gopnik. I highly enjoyed parts of it, I was okay with the rest, and hated chapter on "Rookey" .

I really enjoyed reading these essays about the author and his family while they lived in Paris. He is a very clever writer, and I found myself laughing out loud at many of the essays. It's always so fascinating for me to learn about different cultures, and how they view Americans. I'm looking forward to my visit there in October.