Read The Lover

Michael Herr's Vietnam, in the language the soldiers used; the best book about that war.

Catherine Deneuve as a rubber-plantation owner in French Vietnam as it starts to end.

Saint-Exupery flying the mail over the Sahara and the Andes, and crashing in the Libyan desert.

Hemingway's 1920s Paris, Gertrude Stein and Fitzgerald, published after his death.

Two aristocrats play seduction as a game by letter, in the last decade before the guillotine.

Quasimodo, Esmeralda and the cathedral Hugo wrote the book to save.

Six weeks with an American platoon in Vietnam, filmed by Pierre Schoendoerffer, who had been a prisoner at Dien Bien Phu.

A first love and a fundamentalist childhood in a Wisconsin winter; Craig Thompson's 600 pages.