Two months before I’d had a high-profile job with an enviable salary, a sleek black German sedan on lease, an apartment in a fashionable downtown neighborhood, and a collection of not-so-inexpensive shirts and jackets hanging in the closet. Now, there were a few hundred dollars in my pocket, no job or prospect thereof, some clothes jammed into an old handbag, and a bed in a tattered bookstore to call home. All things considered, I couldn’t have been happier.

Recommended by: Kate’s Book Blog

I really liked the idea of this book. It’s a memoir written by a chap who went to live at Shakespeare & Co., a bookshop and temporary residence for writers and artists in Paris. I like memoirs and I like bookshops (God knows) and I like places that collect interesting people; all of these things I like, but I was bored with Time Was Soft There. I think Jeremy Mercer is just not that great a writer. I have probably been spoiled by Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, but when I read a book about all the people in some place, I want them to be interesting and, I don’t know, vivid. Not so much here. I think it’s a shame, because there’s an interesting story to be told here, and Jeremy Mercer just doesn’t do it very well.

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