Guidebooks for vacations

I like to read the available guidebooks when we're going on vacation, especially when it's to a big, famous tourist place like Paris. They tell me which are the most essential sights and how to see as many of them as possible in the time I have. So when we were planning a trip to Paris and Nice, I bought several different guidebooks and ended up using them all.

The most ubiquitous guidebook right now seems to me to be Fodor's, and they're decent. I tend to like the quirky ones, the kind that promise some kind of insider information or have a slant on the place you're planning to go (like the "Hawaii Revealed" series). For our trip to France, I bypassed the Baedeker's, because after reading Forster's A Room With a View it cracks me up. I got a Fodor's on Paris, one on France as a whole, and another on Provence and the French Riviera. They had good basic information. The guidebook I ended up liking best, though, was a Frommer's on Paris. In addition to the basics, like what days and times a museum is open, Frommer's told me about what train to take and which ticket entrance might be less crowded than the main one. It gave me details on what the difference is between a brasserie, a bistro, a cafe, and a restaurant. It had maps of the metro and the RER, so we could see what the station at the end of the line was (which is how you follow the signs for the direction you want to go).

The quirky book I read in preparation for our trip is entitled "Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong" by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow, and it explores some of the cultural differences between the French and the rest of the world. Some of the most interesting were that the French consider stores extensions of their private space, and so you need to say "Bonjour" when you enter, rather than just begin silently browsing, and that eating a meal is a public activity, rather than just something you do on your own when you get hungry. The ceremony of mealtime is important. I saw a number of children eating multiple-course meals politely with family groups. The most impressive was a child who couldn't have been more than two who sat at a restaurant table for an hour, eating neatly with a fork and making conversation with the adults seated around her. We learned that you have to ask for the check (so you need to know the word, which is "l'addition") because the waiters, who are consummate professionals, won't think of trying to rush you by bringing it before you ask. One time when I watched a waiter filet an entire fish at our tableside and marveled out loud at how quick and efficient he was, he said to me, with a degree of reproach, "it is my job."

In addition to the kind of guidebooks you use for planning, I also find that books you buy along the way can be good substitutes for tours in your language, even the audiotours that have become so popular in museums and art galleries. We found a book in the gift shop at Chartres that helped us "read" some of the iconography of the windows, and I bought a pamphlet from a vending machine at Notre Dame that showed us some of what we were looking at as we walked through. Since we're all fast readers, this worked for us. Most of my guidebook reading takes place as I'm traveling to my destination. We didn't know what we were going to do in Nice until I had five hours on the TGV to figure it out. Sometimes my kids say that I schedule too much "charging about," especially in a big city, but usually I propose a schedule of what we're going to see on which day and everyone else finds it useful because then we don't miss anything out of indolence or inattention to detail.

Do you use guidebooks for vacations? Are there better ones than the ones I've been using?