POSTCARD #3: HOTEL SPLENDIDE

April has arrived and with it another postcard review! This time it’s for Hotel Splendide, written by Austrian author Ludwig Bemelmans in 1942. (Little known fact: Bemelmans was also, apparently, an internationally known gourmet.)

Now, I wouldn’t exactly call this review gushing… but there’s something rather sweet it reveals about the book somehow; a meandering sense of purposelessness. Not that sweet, though: I’m going out on a limb here to say this has not made it to the top of my reading list. But then my reading list is a very long one, and ever-growing, so we shouldn’t hold that against it too much. A bit, but not too much.

Anyone else intrigued by the ending?

Say what you like about the book, but who can spy these beautiful old Penguin cover designs and not feel a little bit happier inside?

1942: Hemingway had just published For Whom the Bell Tolls, Camus had just published L’Etranger, and Ludwig Bemelmans published this slice of fluff. A series of loosely connected vignettes and character sketches set upstairs and downstairs at the Hotel Splendide, it reads as what it was – a collection of pieces written for The New Yorker. My interest waned long before the end, which was only 140 pages from the beginning. Yet I can’t think of anything critical to say about it, beyond the fact that I can’t think of anyone I’d recommend it to. Plus it suddenly gets good in the last chapter, only to leave the story unfin— Jonathan Eyers, jonathaneyers.com/blog 02/04/2012

This is your mission.

Most of us wish we’d read more classic books in our lives. Some of us still gamely plan to; who doesn’t aspire to improve their score on 100 Books To Read Before You Die? If you’re anything like me, you might even have blithely convinced yourself you have read x, or y, or z, until a flash of scenic clarity advises you that you’re thinking not of the book but of the BBC mini series / Disney adaptation / Clueless. And whichever way you look at it, that just doesn’t count.

(I honestly have read Emma. Promise.)

I opened this little gem on Christmas Day 2011. A hundred classic book jackets, each printed on nifty little postcards. Iconic designs that made me feel highbrow without so much as a sniff of an endpaper. Never mind two hundred of them.

A hundred postcards: that's an awful lot of stamps

It quickly became clear I would never find time or (shamefully) inclination to read all the books featured in Postcards from Penguin. Let’s be frank: I would probably never even find enough friends to send them all to.

And that’s where you come in, dear reader.

So here’s what to do:

1. Fill in your details here.
2. Wait.
3. You’ll receive an envelope, inside which will be a postcard and a return address. A pretty Penguin book jacket will feature on your postcard.
4. Buy and read your book. Ponder, learn, love or hate. Keep it forever, pass it on, donate it to Oxfam.
5. Write a review on the postcard. Five words or 500, positive or negative. Serious or silly.
6. Post back the postcard.
7. Keep an eye out for your review right here.

Oh, and spread the word! All the sharing buttons you could ever wish for are below – please pass on the word and keep the momentum going. And join up to our shiny new Facebook page to follow our progress and keep up to date with the reviews submitted.

So jump on board. Happy reading and happy reviewing!