Paris in the Twenties

I can read a book in a couple of days so I go through quite a few--mostly nonfiction and mostly biographies. I am lucky enough to live near a university library where I can check out 20 books at a time for six weeks. Every month or two I check out my limit and I never feel richer than when I have 20 unread books on the shelf.

 I have an electronic reader and I do read out-of-copyright books on my laptop too but I like hardback paper books.  My method in choosing books on a topic is just as old-fashioned. I use the cataloging system at a library catalog website, which in itself is a web of inter-related publications.



You can browse by the subject category and type in a word or three like Paris Social Life. I identify interesting titles that way and check out my local library holdings, the used book market and the ebooks.

As long as you are going to use a library catalog to identify interesting books it might as well be a good library catalog.
Harvard's is nice.
http://lib.harvard.edu/

You can also browse by standard subject headings, defined by the Library of Congress.
For the books on Paris in the 1920s I found many biographies by looking at these subject headings:


Read more about Library of Congress subject headings here:
http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects.html

 I just re-read Charmed circle: Gertrude Stein & company by James R. Mellow.

Once you find an interesting life you meet more interesting characters. To me the whole thing becomes a soap-opera-style network where characters show up and disappear in one biography and then I find they have spin-off biographies of their own...

 Like the fascinating Murphys in Everybody Was So Young  by Amanda Vaill.