A trip to Paris... has to wait

'For Paris without the Notre-Dame will not be the same', says the author

My father’s library was an eclectic one, its shelves lined with everything from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (mandatory reading then for army officers) to literary classics that included Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Irving Stone’s Lust for Life. I am not sure he’d read them all — surprisingly, we never talked about books at home —but as a voracious reader, I would devour everything I could lay my hands on even if I did not then fully comprehend Dostoevsky or Camus. Yet, one book I never made headway with was Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, though not for lack