Books in French - your suggestions please!

That is a feature I haven’t noticed before and I have just downloaded a free book to prove it, but not in French, I find that it is difficult to list French language books only, as the first one in your list shows, but I will certainly investigate further.

I have the whole of A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu on my Kindle, got it free, Proust is a hoot and great fun and just like mayonnaise in that it is super easy but people ooh and aah and bore on about its being difficult and put you off.

On my Kindle, which I bought in the UK but use in France, I use the search facility and enter “free books in the French language”; hundreds of oldies but goodies come up. I receive a notification from Amazon of my free purchase, so you must have an Amazon account. I do feel a bit guilty for not buying the actual books but as the authors are all dead by now, not that guilty.

Do you have an old fashioned Kindle with a keyboard? Mine, also bought in UK but used in France, went belly up years ago and I was then only supplied with touchscreens.
So how do you do a search on the Kindle if no keyboard, or do you search online with a laptop or pc?
I tried several combinations of words last night ‘French books’, ‘books in French’, ‘books in the French language’, ‘books in French edition’ etc., but only got a smattering of French language books, and in one combination (can’t remember which) produced mainly instructional books.

:thinking: Just tap in any text field to display the on-screen keyboard.

David, I just tried “free books in the French language” on my Kindle Paperwhite (like you, I had the 3g keyboard one but it failed and I can’t afford the current equivalent!) and it brought up several thousand books.

I noticed there were references to Kindle Unlimited, which slightly alarmed me, but I managed to download a book free as an experiment without being joined to KU. I suspect not all the search results are free books in French, though.

It’s not as easy as doing it on a computer.

Thanks both @Griffin36 & @Porridge , I too am wary of the traps they like to set for us. If not careful we can sign our lives away. Yesterday I think I touched the screen on switching off by accident and it stayed on but with all the text displayed with a grey background. Touched again and a short horizontal menu appeared. It was sometime before I decided to risk tapping the ‘delete’ option, and all was well. No idea what all that was about. And once when I ordered a book in the normal way on the laptop, I pressed what I thought was confirmation and was immediately presented with an acknowledgment of my choosing audio, at an increased price of course. It took a phone call and a lot of explanation before that was resolved. :roll_eyes:

I’ll try tapping to get the on-screen keyboard when I have plucked up the courage. :rofl:

On my kindle Home page, I tap the “store” icon (looks like a shopping trolley), once in the store, tap search and type “free french language books” and up comes 4,139 titles starting with Voyage au Centre de la Terre by Jules Verne. I tap on this book and up it comes with a big box saying “Buy for Free”, tap on that and I now have another book in my library. Good luck and happy reading.

Thank you @Pursernick , I’ll give that a try a bit later on. :slightly_smiling_face:

You might all like to read something a teeny bit more modern though? I am not dissing these classics obviously but if you want to improve your French and your understanding of our culture then reading something contemporary* is possibly a better bet.

(*by which I do NOT mean the frightful Nouveau Roman which I had to wade through too many of as a child and which makes one want to shoot oneself)

In terms of contemporary - what do you think of Amélie Nothomb, @vero ? I read a couple of hers (from the library!) and found them quite straightforward in terms of language, but she seems to be, shall we say, a bit odd?

(I’ve given up on classics - too hard and largely depressing. I had way too much Dickens at school and anything at all that feels similar is a no-no :smiley: )

Yes she is good - just don’t binge-read because her books will turn into a blur and you won’t remember which is which! You might enjoy Agnes Abécassisas well.
Les Bienveillantes by Jonathan Littell was written in French and is a fantastic book, Waltenberg by Hédi Kaddour is good, and you might like Michel Bussi, Maxime Chattam, Bernard Minier.

Oh I just thought - for some reasons the translations into French of Stieg Larsson Jo Nesbø, Lars Kepler etc are miles better in French

That’s very interesting, @vero - thank you very much! I am currently ploughing my way through the French translation of “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” with my French teacher and I have to say I prefer the French version to the English one :smiley: (Not that I’m terribly keen on either…)

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Only drinking champagne seems to be relatively sensible to me……although a touch monotonous.

… and pretentious! She certainly has her marketing sorted - only wear black, big hats …

Finally got round to following your directions and have downloaded my first book, only an OU intermediate reader but thought it would be good for a start to test the water. All being well I’ll try a ‘real’ book later. :smiley:

Started reading last night but had to give up when a video was supposed to appear but which of course does not work on Kindle. So I will delete it later and look for something I want to read, that was only a test to see if it works, and it does. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I just read Civilisations by Laurent Binet…a counterfactual novel speculating on what might have happened if the Incas had collonised Europe instead of the other way round.

It’s a highly entertaining scenario though probably best suited to history buffs who know a little about the period.

Laurent Binet was a guest on R4 Start the Week back in April when the book was translated into English. Here’s the link for those who are interested: