Followers and Endings

Well I am surprised and delighted to find that this blog has its first follower.  Thank you to Mel U at The Reading Life who has the dubious honour of being the first!  As I am very new to this blogging lark, any suggestions for improvements would be most welcome.  And thanks to The Reading Life's post on The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, I have taken my as yet unopened copy and finally started reading it.  And what an absolute delight.  I love the honest irony and sharp observations from the two narrators Renée, a Parisian concierge and Paloma a twelve year old girl who lives in the same building.  But what really got me reading was the fact that Mel U loved the book but disliked the ending.  So of course, not knowing how it ends, I just had to start and find out....

Here is Renée describing Violette Grelier, the housekeeper for one of the wealthy families who live in the same building,

"All day long she jabbers like a magpie, busily rushing here and there, acting important, reprimanding her menial subalterns as if this were Versailles in better days, and exhausting Manuela with pontificating speeches about the love of a job well done and the decline of good manners.
'She hasn't read Marx,' said Manuela to me one day.  The pertinence of this remark uttered by a Portuguese woman who is in no way well versed in the study of philosophy is striking.  No, Violette Grelier has certainly not read any Marx, for the simple reason that he does not appear on any lists of cleaning products for rich people's silverware."

This is going to be a good read.

Another book I have enjoyed recently, again for its irony, this time both very funny and very sad, is John Green's The Fault in Our Stars.  This is the story of Hazel and Augustus, both teenagers, both with cancer and both falling in love.  Not an obvious subject for a hugely enjoyable read, but the writing is so compelling that I could not put the book down.

At the start of the book, Hazel and Augustus meet at the cancer support group,

"So here's how it went in God's heart: The six or seven or ten of us walked/wheeled in, gazed at a decrepit selection of cookies and lemonade, sat down in the Circle of Trust, and listened to Patrick recount for the thousandth time his depressingly miserable life story - how he had cancer in his balls and they thought he was going to die but he didn't die and now here he is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in America, divorced, addicted to video games, mostly friendless, eking out a meager living by exploiting his cancertastic past, slowly working his way towards a master's degree that will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles to give him the relief that he escaped those many years ago when cancer took both of his nuts but spared what only the most generous soul would call his life.  AND YOU TOO MIGHT BE SO LUCKY!"

I laughed and cried reading this book.  I also hated the ending, not because it felt wrong within the world of the story, but because I so wish it could have been different.

But where else can you go from being a fifty-four year old Parisian concierge to an American teenage cancer patient other than in the pages of a book?  And between the two I joined Harold Fry as he walked the length of England in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, but more of that later.