The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Just as I've learned whom to trust in matters of book recommendations, I'm also cautious when recommending a book. While I am often eager to convince members of my book club to read novels I've already read and loved, we more often choose a title none of us have read. For April, at my suggestion, based completely on the word of one of my favorite readers, we settled on Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog. As I started reading this unusual story, translated from French, of a nondescript concierge and a young girl contemplating suicide, I worried about how my group would respond. Truly, much of the book delves deep into philosophy. I loved both characters, Renee and her young neighbor Paloma, and enjoyed the alternating accounts. I kept wondering, though, when they would discover one another, kindred spirits from such different backgrounds.

They meet through Kakuro Uzo, the newest tenant in the building, and what results is a beautiful, heartbreaking story of love and hope and friendship. I'm not one to weep, but just now, as I've turned the last page of the book, I feel heartbroken. Already, I'm thinking of who all I know that need to read this book too.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Flexible Book Clubs

I must confess that my book club does everything in a sporadic fashion, probably because of me. We have been reluctant to establish a date each month and stick to it because that often means someone is left out. As a result, we sometimes end up discussing a book long enough after reading it that we have to review before the discussion.

Fortunately, these are not women who read one book and then wait to read another one until after it has been assigned. We arrive with bags of books we have read either to return to their rightful owners or to share. We have clippings from the newspaper and printouts of online reviews. Our selection for the next meeting comes almost arbitrarily, and we rarely settle for one book.

This month, we shared lots of other suggestions. I had my list from the conference. One of the members had taken a long family road trip, so she had her vacation reading to share. We finally decided to read Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America by Helen Thorpe and Half Broke Horses, Jeanette Walls' "true-life novel" about her maternal grandmother we had read about in her memoir The Glass Castle.

Once we'd selected our book(s) and decided to try a regular monthly meeting date for the coming year, we kept throwing around titles, responding, "Yeah, I loved that one" or "Is this one yours? May I read it next?" We weighed in on the Twilight series (some loved them, some didn't), and before long, we were headed back home, our bags of books redistributed and our nightstand stack of books to read just a little taller.

Flexible Book Clubs