Les Adventures Du Petit Nicolas

These books are a riot. And, once you get in the swing of things, they are very readable. I've been studying French in adult school off and on for three years and I do great with these books. I've actually read Petit Nicholas and Les Copains. And, yes, there are a ton of these volumes. In France, you can get them in any bookstore, so I'm asking for them as a holiday gift from my French cousins. And, next time I go to France, I'm taking an extra suitcase to bring home as many as I can find.

If you haven't encountered him, Petit Nicholas is a young boy who from France who tells the most wonderful stories about his "copains", his parents, and his school. Told from a waist-high viewpoint and with complete irreverence, Nicholas is especially enchanting because his grammar is not too complex for a 2d or 3d year student to follow - you can "get it" without spending countless hours looking things up. Favorites? Father caught red-handed in a park pool by Les Gendarmes, who don't believe he was trying to *return* the goldfish! (By the way, this is a series of books, not a single volume).