While everyone is quick to offer their varied opinions about the first timers%26#39; guides to Paris (Eyewitness, Rick Steves, etc), for those of us who have been a bunch, I%26#39;m wondering which of the %26quot;specialty%26quot; guides people have enjoyed paging through, or better yet, enjoyed so much they felt compelled to purchase?
For example, we have eat.shop Paris, which seems great for veterans as it has some (interesting) suggestions that Frommers or Rick Steves might not, but probably wouldn%26#39;t be a recommended %26quot;bible%26quot; for the first timer. As I do my research, I%26#39;m wondering if I%26#39;m leaving anything out.
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Ahh, the pile just grows and grows in our living room cupboard. Move Italy to the front when thinking of Italy, France to the front when thinking of France, give them to each other as gifts so we can read them too. Hundreds of dollars I%26#39;m afraid as books are expensive here.
Most of it is research stuff, you can%26#39;t carry them all. Rick Steves is good for the selected areas he covers and for general info but you can be sure that any restaurant or hotel he recommends will be filled with Americans and thats not really why we go to Italy or France. Eyewitness is pretty but superficial. Good to get an idea if you want to go but look for detail elsewhere.
The AA guides from England often give good drives and sights along the way, eg the AA Key Guide to Italy and AA Best Drives, helping to plan itineraries; the Rough Guides and Lonely Planet for detailed information about areas and towns. Insight Guides are kind of a blend of Eyewitness and Lonely Planet, a fair whack of information and good pictures and maps with reasonable divisions of text into country areas, food, history etc.
There are a few Lonely Planet World Food books, maybe out of print but available on line, like World Food Italy or World Food Spain that give tons of information about specialities of areas, food, wine,cheese, specialist shops etc plus great menu decoders and they are small enough to carry.
There is also a series of books called Touring in Wine Country published by Mitchell Beazley that cover areas of France and Italy in terms of the wine areas and what they produce. Some nice photos too.
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Routard is good. If you read a little French you can get by with the original, which is basically a book full of recommended restaurants and hotels. If you dont read French, the %26quot;the Rough Guide to french Hotels and Restaurants%26quot; takes the best recommendations from all over France and translates them. Routard is compiled, rather than written, from reports filed by ordinary food fans, concentrating on the affordable and good quality. It has never let me down.
Time Out guides are a bit quirky, but they occasionally find some interesting corners not mentioned elsewhere. The Michelin Guides (of course), red for eating and drinking, green for tourism. The Cadogan Guides get good reviews, but I have no personal experience.
I assume Rick Steves is something like Frommers. It isn%26#39;t a book I have ever seen (or even heard of until I started posting here), but if it IS like Frommers, it would perhaps be best on the fiction shelves :¬) Of the bulk sellers, I think the Rough Guides just pip Lonely Planet, and DK are in a category of their own - kind of %26quot;travel P0rn%26quot; with practicalities thrown in
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Do elaborate on the Frommers and Fiction connection. It is not a book I have used.
Rick Steves is American and really immensely practical in his recommendations. I can%26#39;t fault what he says it is just that everything he recommends becomes bible for the Americans, many of whom have studied no further, and they flock to it, clutching Rick Steves guides under their arms.
We had an experience in Siena, so that a restaurant he had recommended had a poor benighted waitress standing there to define every dish on the menu because all these tourists had descended on their restaurant and had no idea of what the Italian food entailed. My husband ordered spagetti bolognese and was asked %26quot;you want the meat sauce?%26quot; I ordered zuppa cozze and was told %26quot;It is not a soup%26quot;. The woman was clearly distressed from arguing the menu with the tourists. Obviously they had been having problems with people who had no idea what they were ordering. She even asked us where we were from when it was clear we understood the food. So Rick Steves knows what he is doing but he steers a whole lot of ignorant people onto the unsuspecting locals. I think they read the recommended restaurants and hotels but never study the food or culture of the region they are visiting.
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Frommers always strikes me as a book for people who want to believe that France is caught in some sort of 1950s Hollywood timewarp hell... I do own the book, but never use it except to get a fourth (or fifth) opinion
I would give examples - but I don%26#39;t have it with me at the moment. It%26#39;s in my French house (I know - that does make me sound rather pretentious, but life has a way of playing tricks on you!)
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I like DK. I love the pictures and their drawings, and little maps and itineraries. No narratives, please.
From this bit of info, I start searching.
I usually look up government, city, town, regional tourist offices and request maps and literature.
I do almost everything on line now.
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I think the best restaurant guide is %26quot;Eating and Drinking in Paris%26quot; by Herbach and Dillon.
One of the issues I have with the mainstream guides is that they often try to be all things to all people. They need to be %26quot;politically correct%26quot; in their descriptions and recommendations. By that, I mean that they often leave things out of their guide that they should have included because it might be controversial. For instance, NONE of the guidebooks I know mention some of the real offbeat things you can see in Pere Lachaise cemetery because they might offend some people. Another one I can think of off the top of my head is that few guidebooks, if any, (esp Rick Steve%26#39;s) mentions the Scavi tour in Rome, which was the highlight of my trip 2 years ago.
Most of the mainstream guides contain a lot of fluff that I would never use, that%26#39;s why I compiled all of my travel notes, and put them in my own guide. You can download it right away at http://geocities.com/hiddenparis
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Thanks for the link Stephen. My husband in on sabbatical from a university in Canada, so we are spending a year in Ireland with out two children. We are taking our first trip to Paris December 29.
I have Eyewitness Europe and Lonely Planet Western Europe. I have been downloading Paris info from Rick Steves and Frommers and collecting stuff here. I may get a proper decent Paris book, but what I really need is a small book with info and maps.
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Rough Guide, Time Out (the two best in my view)and a few others actually do smaller, pocket size versions that still contain all the maps, metro guide, and other basic information you need.
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I%26#39;m not sure what you mean by %26quot;specialty%26quot; guides because it seems that what is being listed is %26quot;general%26quot; and not so specific. But here are a few books I have and like.
Paris, Paris, Journey into the City of Light by David Downie
An Hour from Paris by Annabel Simms
Markets of Paris by Dixon and Ruthanne Long
Clotilde%26#39;s Edible Adventures in Paris by Clotilde Dusoulier (author of Chocolate %26amp; Zucchini) (My friends used this book in Paris in September and enjoyed all of their finds.)
Into a Paris Quartier by Diane Johnson (about St-Germaine-des-Pres area)
Quiet Corners of Paris by Jean-Christophe Napias
Happy Travels.
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I agree wholeheartedly with Pixfield on the %26quot;Eating and Drinking in Paris%26quot; guide. It is wonderful!
Before I left for Paris, my sister gave me a book called Hg2 Paris (a Hedonist%26#39;s Guide to Paris). It has lovely pictures and write ups of wonderful places to stay, eat, see etc. As the title suggests, this guide is more for people with gobs of money and looking for the finest of everything - so not me but was good for a look anyway!!
The book itself doesn%26#39;t have only the top restaurants and hotels in it however. One thing I found comical about it was a write up for a bizarre little hole in the wall restaurant in the Latin Quarter called %26quot;Chez Mai%26quot; which is basically a tiny place filled with junk, and the owner is Mai, an elderly Asian woman who lives at the restaurant. She serves delicious noodle soups, etc. but is described in the book as being %26quot;mad as a box of frogs%26quot;.
Meant to check that place out just for the surreal factor but never made it there. Next time...
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