Bonjour 40: A Paris travel log

by Karen A. Chase

An eLit silver award winner for best travel essay non-fiction. If Karen A. Chase absolutely had to turn forty, she decided she could do it gracefully in Paris… for nearly forty days. What began as a blog to communicate with friends and family, became a travel journal filled with over a months’ worth of humorous and insightful glimpses into her Paris adventures, each of which could be read in about forty seconds. Journal entries are interspersed with Chase's own inspiring photography. Additional, longer stories richly fill in details allowing readers to reflect upon her experiences with food, travel, photography, Parisians, writing, and love in the City of Lights. Through her Parisian- and self-exploration, comes a book that brings to life the richness of Paris as seen through the eyes of a romantic travel junkie. Chase shows readers the joys of turning 40, and with her magical view of Paris, they'll be ready to board a plane before they've turned the last page.

Genres: Travel, France, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Memoir, Biography

131 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2011

About the author

Karen A. Chase is the award-winning author of CARRYING INDEPENDENCE. No. 12 on the Top 100 Indie books of 2019, it was short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Indie Publishing Award, and was a semifinalist in the Screencraft Cinematic Book competition. Karen was a visiting scholar at the American Antiquarian Society and a Virginia Humanities 2019-2020 Library of Virginia Fellow.

Her first book, Bonjour 40: A Paris Travel Log, garnered seven independent publishing awards. She is a member of James River Writers, the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Historical Novelist Society, and the American Revolutionary Round Table. Originally from Calgary, Canada, she resides with two scrappy cats, and her partner, Ted, in Richmond, Virginia.

Reviews

[Catherine Bateson · Rating 1 out of 5]

The washing machine at the Cite International des Arts that I favour takes 45 minutes. So did this book. Badly written, smug and uneventful, this should have stayed a blog for family and friends. Reminder to self, you can now stop getting books just because they have Paris in the title!

[Sheree · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

Oh how I loved this ... let me count the ways - Oh combien j'ai aimé ça ... laissez-moi compter les manières.

I fell in love with the cover.

I love the romance of Paris & the beauty of the French language.

I've always wanted to go to Paris; now even more so!

I love food, I drooled at the mention of food; cakes, custards, pastries, icecreams, café crème, chocolate, bread, fresh produce.

I LOVE cheese - day 29 I was in heaven :)

Even though my age is 4-0, I can sincerely say there is a spirit in me that is still thirty, or twenty, or even ten. Perhaps it’s because I’m giving that little girl in me the gift she’s always wanted - a grand adventure.

I love that Karen 'packed light' in more ways than just the literal.

I love that Karen mentioned being in Paris for William & Kate's wedding, her adventure is recently fresh.

I loved Karen's photos, the capturing of memories. I wanted more!

I loved Karen's attitude and I do believe it applies to more than just the language. "I’m now convinced that speaking a new language is 25 percent knowledge, 50 percent experience, and 25 percent having the balls to open your mouth and speak it."

I LOVE this quote: “I will lay down solid foundations here on earth so you can walk in the clouds for a while.”


My brief journey to Paris through Karen's eyes was Délicieux! Magnifique; not the Paris that tourists visit for the day, but the heart & soul of Paris; little jumbled streets, quaint cafes, charming stores, unique wares, the French outdoor markets, tucked away galleries, the art, the people, the peek into daily life.


I'd love to eat my way through Paris
I'd love to linger for hours savouring a meal
I want to discover the best macaroon
I'd like to sample baguettes from Boulangerie's across Paris
I want to wander the Louvre for hours
I'd love to visit the unique Shakespeare & Company bookstore & attend a Mad Hatters Tea Party
I want to ride a bike in Paris
I want my mouth to water over le chocolat chaud at Cafe Viennes & creme brulee at Cafe de Modernes.
I want to eat at The Crab Shack & pat Bandit
I want to kiss in Paris

Read Bonjour 40 ... you'll love it!

[Jamie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm not often inclined to write a review when finished with a book, but in this case I felt compelled to make an exception.

This "travel log" is supposed to be about a month-long trip to Paris to celebrate the author turning 40. Up until about 80% through the book, I learned that she rode her bike a lot in Paris, took her sexual frustration out on her pillow, liked the Louvre, and enjoyed London and Provence. She didn't particularly seem to appreciate the customs and lifestyle of Parisian living, she loathes tourists (despite being one), and she has no great love of Americans (despite choosing to live among them instead of in her homeland of Canada). Finally, toward the final 20% of the book she mentions a few of the sights that define Paris.

I had intended to give the book 2 stars, until the author decided to clamp a lock on "Lover's Bridge," properly known as Pont des Artes, and toss a key into the Seine to "guarantee" long-lasting love with her boyfriend. Any true lover of Paris knows that this destructive behavior is frowned upon (and in fact has recently been declared illegal).

Lastly, I found much of the writing to be vulgar and all of it to be amateurish. Ms. Chase mentions that her dream is to quit her day job to pursue writing, but it doesn't seem likely to happen.

[Sheree · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lurved the extra photos.

I read the ebook version of Bonjour 40: A Paris Travel Log by Karen A Chase back in 2011 and was completely smitten. My one wish from this treasure of a book, (well I have more than one, the top one involving my own love affair with France and a healthy obsession with cheese, chocolate and pastries in no particular order of preference ... but I digress) was more photos and earlier this year I got my wish.

The lovely Karen sent me the beautiful photography print edition of Bonjour 40 and with "Paris in July" what a perfect opportunity to squeal a little more about this book that had me wanting to eat my way through France and kiss in Paris. It's also the first time I've been quoted for a cover book 'blurb' ... exciting :)

My sister holidayed in the UK/Paris in 2012 with a Paris to-do-list which included some of Karen's experiences from Bonjour 40. My request was she visit Dorothee's crab shack and take a photo of the much talked about Bandit. I emailed Karen asking for directions and my sister had drinks at L'Amuse Gueule and I got my photo :)

I'm longing to visit and fulfill my own dreams but for now Bonjour 40 is the next best thing :)

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

You can read my take here.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful book full of pictures and words that create even more pictures in our minds.To be able to spend soo...many days in Paris(or anywhere you truly love)would be a dream come true.What an adventure and one I enjoyed traveling on with her.My favorite part is the sinful story.In my mind it goes for everything not just food.

[Paulita Kincer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This year, I lucked into a number of books set in France, both novels and memoirs. This week, I finished Bonjour 40: A Paris Travel Log by Karen A. Chase. Chase traveled to Paris to celebrate her 40th birthday and spent nearly 40 days in Paris with her boyfriend meeting her over there toward the end of her trip. She kept a travel blog and turned it into a book.
I'm not a short story reader, so maybe I'm not the typical reader for this book. I enjoyed some of the short posts, but I needed more meat to the story. I thought this book could instead make a great calendar with insights for every day.
Even though the book was short, 132 pages in paperback, it took me quite a while to finish it. Nothing dragged me back to it. I read it on my Kindle so I would turn to it in my spare moments.
Toward the end I found some really lovely writing as Chase described moments of light and love in Paris.
"The first was while we were bicycling along the Seine near the Grand Palais, our tires crunching through the gravel. The mid-afternoon sun was dappling through the thick canvas of leaves overhead, falling randomly onto the dusty path ahead of us. Ted and I rode on opposite sides of a long row of chestnut trees, seeing each other in between the darkened trunks, like a movie-reel slowed so you could see every photo-perfect frame."
This memoir may interest you if you want some small bites of one person's trip to Paris.

[Leonel · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Bounjor 40," by Karen A Chase, is subtitled "A Paris Travel Log, 40 years, 40 days, 40 seconds," and for a wanderlust like me, seemed to be the perfect book to read. Chase, upon turning forty, planned on living in Paris for forty days, and she updated her friends via her travel blog, with each entry to be read in forty seconds. This book collates all her entries plus a couple of refection essays. Her premise is brave and innovative, and is something a lot of us would probably love to do (I myself would choose London) However, I found that there wasn't a lot of meat here. Chase writes well, and with a spirit of wistfulness. I just wish there was something else - a love affair, a revelation, a transformation - that gave this book a little bit of depth. Even the touristic locations she chose seem run-of-the-mill, and not distinctive from any other travel book out there. For example, she speaks frequently of Dorothee, a lady who owns a crab restaurant near the corner of her apartment, but we really do not get to know her. We don't even know how they met. Writing the book version gave the chance for Chase to expand on a lot of her entries, but she didn't. A missed opportunity, I would say.

http://luhathoughts.blogspot.com/2014...

[Vicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has always been a dream of mine to spend a few weeks in Paris, but that will probably never happen. So I did the next best thing. I read this book.

I loved reading about the bookstores, museums and people of Paris. I love seeing a few of the photos the author took while she was there. She tells the reader what the food is like, what the sights, sounds and smells are and what she was feeling, and that made it seem so real.

The book wasn't exactly what I expected it to be, I thought it was more like a journal of the places she went, but I'm so glad she made it more personal. Whenever I start feeling sad that I'll never make it Paris, I'll read this book again. It's the next best thing to actually being there.

[Andie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a sucker for any book about Paris, but this compilation of blog posts, interspersed with "reflective" essays, written on Karen Chase's month-long trip to Paris to celebrate her fortieth birthday is fairly mediocre of this ever-growing genre of travel literature.

If you've sent any time at all in Paris, there is not much to be learned here. However, if you're a first-time visitor, this book can give you a good overview of the city and its inhabitants. And as this book is very short, it can easily be read in a couple of hours

[Kerry · Rating 2 out of 5]

The idea is a good one--it has a lot of appeal and potential. Unfortunately, this potential went only partially realized. Before putting the entries into a book, Chase could have expounded on her ideas, cut out the mundane or cliched, and dug more deeply into her experiences.

I was disappointed to read in the introduction that this was a book form of blog entries. A blog is one style of writing--what goes into a book is another type, whether memoir, travel log, or something else.

Paris is an infinitely appealing subject. But its popularity shouldn't be used to drive readership.

[Priscilla · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the book title says, most of the "chapters" are a 40 second read. I did linger longer over a few of them. The book is about Karen Chase's 40 day stay in Paris, on her own except for the last few days when her fiancé joined her, that was originally written as a blog. The way she approached Paris was also a metaphor for how she was looking at herself as she turned 40. So here's another book that had me with my feet in the USA, and my head in France.

[Relyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book. Ok, I sort of liked it. There was absolutley nothing wrong with it. But, there is nothing to especially recommend it either. It's a little bit like reading a friend's letters home from Paris. If it weren't your friend, or it weren't Paris, you just wouldn't bother. This is just a simple story about a nice lady who had a nice adventure. Not bad, just a bit dull. Honestly, I'd be irritated if I had paid more than a few bucks to buy this on Kindle.

[Kt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great summer read, thoughtful and interesting short travel memoir. The first few chapters had me looking online at hotels in and flights to Paris. As I got further into the book it helped me realize that a vacation anywhere is something to savor and revel in a different place, culture, people and glorious free time to explore, eat, drink and enjoy life.

[Staci · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this book. Made me want to pack my bags and live in Paris just like the author did!! I would recommend this one to anyone who dreams of traveling and needs some inspiration to make some positive changes to their life.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice little read - Karen Chase turns 40 and celebrates the occasion by spending 40 days in Paris. Her journal-style writing allows the reader to experience the City of Light vicariously through Karen's eyes.

[Marjie C-O · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lots of meh shrug with very occasional moments of ahhhh. Very little true detail of what the author did and saw in Paris, rather a lot of waxing mawkishly rhapsodic and not even very well. Read "The Most Beautiful Walk in the World" instead.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three years ago I was fortunate enough to spend a few days in Paris, but that taste only ignited in me a desire for an extended stay. Thank you, Karen, for sharing the fulfillment of your dream...it gives me hope that one day I may be able to do the same!

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun travel memoir set out in diary format. The author goes to Paris for 40 days for her 40th birthday.

[Jason Reeser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having just been to Paris, I found much of this fit in with my own experiences. Some of it not so much. But overall a nice feel and taste of Paris.

[Stacey Peters · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining memoir.

[Leana Delle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, because I love Paris! A quick and easy read, it took me back to the sights and sounds of the city of love.

[Lorraine · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Bonjour 40', Karen Chase's memoir detailing her trip to Paris France to celebrate her 40th birthday was a wonderfully light, bright and FAST read. Truly delightful!

[Tim Moon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good book. Easily, one of the better travelogues I've read.

[Andrea]

I loved this book! When the author turned 40, she spent 40 days in Paris. That should mean that when I turn 65 in June I get to spend 65 days in Paris, right?

[Kl · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fun read. Took me back to Paris and gave me lots of new places to explore. Can't wait to try the crab shack!!

[Janice · Rating 5 out of 5]

savory gorgeous Paris

Wonderful descriptions of romantic Paris. Also loved the format. 40 days. Made me feel like I was along for the ride.

[Ana Maria · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not too much to say about this book. Usually,love reading anything related to France and the French but this book bored me.

[Dorothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I too want to visit Paris for an extended stay and this was just the book to help me know what it would be like. Easy read, great information and pictures.

[Paige]

I won this book in the goodreads giveaway and have just received it in the mail! I'll update my review once I have read it :D