I'm having a very peculiar experience with the book I am currently reading: I love it so much I don't want to read it. If I read it, I get closer to the end, and it will be a sad day when I finish this one.
Usually, I'm a consumed reader: Once I start a book, I find every spare moment to plow through it at the expense of mothering, cleaning and all other work. I can be very annoying. I have no ability to pace myself. Hence, for the past few years I have actually limited my reading to designated vacation times (like the time I read five books over the week Elliot and I went to Greece, childless). But this book I'm working on now has very little plot, thus the need to find out what happens isn't driving my usual insatiable consumption.
What is this book? you're probably asking by now. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (translated from French by Alison Anderson). It is written in a way that exactly speaks to my perception of the world, and I love that, in its French philosophical tone, it grapples with the concepts of beauty and art in a completely unsentimental way.
The negative reviews on Amazon, of which there are few, call the two narrators pretentious and narcissistic which is absolutely true, but that is exactly what makes me laugh out loud while I'm reading this on the treadmill at the gym. They are so darn funny! I have rarely met more complicated, unpleasant and yet completely consuming characters whose perceptions of truth and beauty resonate all the more because of the prickly (ahem, hedgehog-like) messengers.
Reading this book got me thinking about some of the other books that will forever hold a place on my bookshelf (regardless of how many others Elliot makes me donate to the library):
Of Human Bondage, by Somerset Maugham. I read this book in sixth grade and it was the first time I felt like I'd read and understood something that was truly grown-up. I remember feeling like I understood something about the world that I would never get to learn through my own life experience.
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton. My love affair with Wharton started not with House of Mirth, but with Summer, which I read in eighth grade. My first Wharton book, it dealt with some themes I hadn't explored in school books before: disillusion, loss of innocence, and most importantly, existentialism. I remember sitting in front of my Brother word processing machine with my mom, the World Book Encyclopedia open across our laps, reading together the explanation of existentialism and talking about how to best communicate the concept in my essay about the book. In tenth grade, I read House of Mirth and maybe it was the New York setting or the female protagonist, but it instantly became my favorite book. Mr. O'Connor, in my English class at school, pointed out a particular passage in which Wharton describes the jewels Lily wears during the "tableau scene" and assigned us to write our own passages in exactly the same grammatical structure: a noun where Wharton had a noun, a verb to a verb, exact same number of words in the sentences, commas in the same place, etc. I don't remember what I wrote about but I do remember that a whole new linguistic lilt came to my pen as I realized that putting words in the sequence Wharton had was truly an art and not something easily duplicated.
Howards End, by E.M. Forster. I make a point of reading Howards End every few years. After having first read it in high school, I read it again when my mom sold the apartment I had grown up in. The book helped me understand my dad better, to try to "only connect" with him, and when Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bohnam Carter stared in the movie, it became one of my favorite movies too. I have since read all but one of Forster's novels and I love the man deeply.
Crossing To Safety, by Wallace Stegner. This is a favorite among book clubs, and a book club is where I first read it myself. Newly married, its theme of adult couple friendships hit me so true at that point in my life and gave me a standard by which to judge future friendships. It also struck me that Stegner could write a whole compelling novel about... well, just life. No huge traumatic events or horribly dysfunctional families. Just a book about the friends we make and the jobs we have and the people we love. And yet it is still modern, meaningful and real.
Atonement, by Ian McEwan. Ian McEwan has got a gimmick: He writes about choices. He explores how the smallest choices we make -- which direction we turn when looking out a window, who we ask to deliver a letter -- can determine our fates. Atonement was so startling to me because, in retrospect, I had the strange feeling that I could change one or two of those little choices the characters make and, like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, the story would turn out completely differently. I hated being trapped by the choices the characters make, but when we learn at the end that Briony has taken the liberty of rewriting the whole history of her sister and her lover, it's like she opens the door for each of us to rewrite it for ourselves. It was a strangely powerful feeling, and it's led me to many more of McEwan's novels.
What are some of the books that will always have a place on your bookshelf? I would love to hear from any of you who read this so that I can start making a list for my next uninterrupted, child-free vacation!
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