I just cannot believe this! I spent good amount of this afternoon writing reviews of some of the books I have read lately, went to sing some Christmas carols (leading to Christmas there are these "most beautiful Christmas carols" sing-alongs in many churches), came home and thought to finish this post in a few minutes -and all the reviews had disappeared!! :( I really don't know what happened. I'm quite sure I saved the draft. But gone they are, and now I don't have time to rewrite them all. I'll just write one review now and post the two others in another post.
I started reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery weeks and weeks ago. And I loved it. I loved the precocious words of 12-year-old Paloma Josse, a girl who has decided to kill herself on her 13th birthday as she believes that people are "programmed to believe in something that doesn't exist, because we are living creatures; we don't want to suffer. So we spend all our energy persuading ourselves that there are things that are worthwhile and that that is why life has meaning." Paloma is afraid that she is going to start believing that, too.
I also enjoyed reading about Renée, the concierge of the Parisian apartment building where Paloma lives. Renée is working very hard to be an ordinary concierge while in fact she is nothing but, or rather she does not match the conventional idea of what a concierge should be like. Renée is very widely read and loves culture and the arts.
The book is full of wonderful sentences and passages.It is really beautifully written. My copy is now full of little, purple post-it slips to mark some of my favorite passages. Somehow the writing style is also very French. I would love to be able to read the book in original French, but, alas, I'm not.
This far, all good. Right after I finished reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog I gave it five stars in Goodreads, but when I think of it now, I must say that today I would probably give one star less. I loved the writing, I loved the characters, also the other characters in addition to Renée and Paloma, but I simply hated the ending! It was odd. I felt like somebody had said to the writer that ok, the book is long enough, now finish it up. The ending came from nowhere and left me feeling cheated. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for surprising endings, this time it just simply did not work for me, not at all.
Some of the best parts of the book were Paloma's "profund thoughts". I'll finish this short review with one of those. Food for thought for us all:
I started reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery weeks and weeks ago. And I loved it. I loved the precocious words of 12-year-old Paloma Josse, a girl who has decided to kill herself on her 13th birthday as she believes that people are "programmed to believe in something that doesn't exist, because we are living creatures; we don't want to suffer. So we spend all our energy persuading ourselves that there are things that are worthwhile and that that is why life has meaning." Paloma is afraid that she is going to start believing that, too.
I also enjoyed reading about Renée, the concierge of the Parisian apartment building where Paloma lives. Renée is working very hard to be an ordinary concierge while in fact she is nothing but, or rather she does not match the conventional idea of what a concierge should be like. Renée is very widely read and loves culture and the arts.
The book is full of wonderful sentences and passages.It is really beautifully written. My copy is now full of little, purple post-it slips to mark some of my favorite passages. Somehow the writing style is also very French. I would love to be able to read the book in original French, but, alas, I'm not.
This far, all good. Right after I finished reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog I gave it five stars in Goodreads, but when I think of it now, I must say that today I would probably give one star less. I loved the writing, I loved the characters, also the other characters in addition to Renée and Paloma, but I simply hated the ending! It was odd. I felt like somebody had said to the writer that ok, the book is long enough, now finish it up. The ending came from nowhere and left me feeling cheated. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for surprising endings, this time it just simply did not work for me, not at all.
Some of the best parts of the book were Paloma's "profund thoughts". I'll finish this short review with one of those. Food for thought for us all:
"But if you dread tomorrow, it's because you don't know how to build the present, and when you don't know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it's a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up becoming today, don't you see?" [p. 124]Last but not least something totally different: Inspired by Amanda from the Zen Leaf I have desided to take up a personal reading challenge for 2010. Lately I have read so much in English that I've kind of fallen behind when it comes to reading Finnish writers. Thus I promise myself to read more Finnish authors in 2010. My aim is to read 20 books, both new releases and older novels I have not yet read. I'm pretty excited about this personal challenge! I even made a simple banner just for myself! :)
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