Jo من عند Zărnești, رومانيا من عند Zărnești, رومانيا

This is a beautiful book that contains a lot of what is so great about the Moomimtroll books (the characterizations, and the close observation of nature) in a more naturalistic, realist way. I loved it and would like to spend my summer on a Scandinavian island too!

This memoir, written by a U.S. expatriate living in Paris, is a lovely read; it includes information about a closed community in Paris, the art and engineering of piano-building, and the joy of playing an instrument. Here's a sample of Carhart's writing: "We moved back to the United States when I was eight, living outside Washington, D.C., in northern Virginia. My parents found a piano teacher who was almost a caricature of the spinster who gives lessons in her home. Miss Pemberton was a genteel Southerner of a certain age, and she lived with her mother in a dilapidated mansion set back from the road where the suburbs had encroached on what had until recently been wild....We had a serviceable upright at home, a Kimball, bought secondhand from a neighbor, and I was able to practice the exercises that were so essential a part of Miss Pemberton's approach. Hanon was her Bible: The Virtuoso Pianist in Sixty Exercises for the Piano. Compiled in the nineteenth century by a Frenchman, C. L. Hanon, its yellow cover looked down at me reprovingly from the piano's music desk. 'Hanon will never let you down,' she would announce as I was leaving the big gray house where I had played to a metronome for the previous half hour, as if betrayal and being 'let down' were what I most feared from the world of music."