A-Z Wednesday

A-Z Wednesday is hosted by Vicky of Reading at the Beach

Welcome to A-Z Wednesday!!
To join, here's all you have to do:
Go to your stack of books and find one whose title starts with the letter of the week.
Post:
1~ a photo of the book
2~ title and synopsis
3~ link (amazon, barnes and noble etc.)

Be sure to visit other participants to see what book they have posted and leave them a comment.(We all love comments, don't we?) Who knows? You may find your next "favorite" book.

This Week's Letter is "L"

The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Pages: 96

The Little Prince describes his journey from planet to planet, each tiny world populated by a single adult. It's a wonderfully inventive sequence, which evokes not only the great fairy tales but also such monuments of postmodern whimsy as Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. And despite his tone of gentle bemusement, Saint-Exupéry pulls off some fine satiric touches, too. There's the king, for example, who commands the Little Prince to function as a one-man (or one-boy) judiciary:

I have good reason to believe that there is an old rat living somewhere on my planet. I hear him at night. You could judge that old rat. From time to time you will condemn him to death. That way his life will depend on your justice. But you'll pardon him each time for economy's sake. There's only one rat.

The author pokes similar fun at a businessman, a geographer, and a lamplighter, all of whom signify some futile aspect of adult existence. Yet his tale is ultimately a tender one--a heartfelt exposition of sadness and solitude, which never turns into Peter Pan-style treacle. Saint-Exupéry's drawings offer a handy rebuttal: they're fresh, funny, and like the book itself, rigorously truthful.


I am 42 years old and I read this book for the first time last month. I loved it, it was one of the best books I've read this year. I even reviewed it, that is how you know it did something to me. You can read that here if you wish and my interpretation of it.