Linda's Book Selections

The Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery

Blurb:

“We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building’s tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence.

Then there’s Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.

Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma’s trust and to see through Renée’s timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.”

This is my first choice. This book had gotten such rave reviews and was apparently a huge best seller in France, that when I decided to order some books from which to select the next book club book this was at the top of my list. Scott picked it up before I got a chance to and loved it. Hopefully I can entice him to give you his thoughts on the book. I know that his comments as he has been reading it have made me want to read it immediately.

The Stolen Child
by Keith Donohue

This is one of my favorite reads from last year. I don’t normally read books where the main characters are children but this got such great reviews and is not in anyway a book written for children. I loved this debut novel about two changeling boys. A changeling is a creature from folklore which secretly takes the place of a human child. The title is taken from the Yeats poem which I had never read before but which adds an interesting dimension to the book. The chapters alternate between the story of the “changeling” that kidnaps the boy Henry Day and takes his place in the human world and Henry Day who becomes one of the “changelings” (now called Aniday) that live in the woods. I especially liked how the chapters alternated between the two boys’ stories. For example you get Henry Day’s perspective on being kidnaped and then the changeling’s perspective of changing into Henry Day and fitting into his human family. It would have been easy to dislike the changeling who took Henry away from his family but the author did a marvelous job of developing his story as well and indeed by the end, I found him an equally sympathetic character. While I enjoyed learning about the life of the changelings in the woods I thought the author did a wonderful job in showing how similar the two boys were. Both boys were struggling with their past, who they had been and who they were now.

I also enjoyed the author’s writing style. Aniday speaking of his assimilation into the changeling family:

“They showed me the hidden things silence revealed: a pheasant craning its neck to spy on us from a thicket, a crow hopping from branch to branch, a raccoon snoring in its den. Before the daylight completely faded, we tramped through the wet grounds to the mucky bank of the river. Along the water’s edge ice crystals grew, and listening closely, we heard the crack of freezing. A single duck paddled further down the river, and each snowflake hissed as it hit the water’s surface. The sunlight faded like a whisper and vanished.” p 32 Trade Paper edition.

This is my second choice and I highly recommend it. I note that there is a movie now out on DVD called the Changeling directed by Clint Eastwood which I at first thought might be a version of this or similar to it but it isn’t. In the movie the police simply “return” the wrong boy to the mother and there are no actual “changelings” involved at all.

The Book of Lost Things
by John Connolly

This is another book that I bought as a possible book club selection and it is my third choice. I have not yet finished reading it. The story is about a 12-year-old English boy, David, who, after the death of his mother, moves with his father and new step mother to the new wife’s family’s country estate. David is given an attic room lined with old books from a previous occupant and the books begin to literally whisper to him. One day after seeing an intruder in his room, David hears his dead mother’s voice in the sunken garden calling to him for help. He follows the voice and finds himself in a very different place. This new place is not the realm of Disney fairy tales but harkens back to the brutality of the original Grimms fairy tales that do not necessarily have happy endings. This book is definitely not written for kids, or adults who are the faint of heart. Although many of the adventures David encounters echo fairy tales that we all know they all definitely have unique twists and it is David’s understanding of these stories from his reading that enables him to prevail. (Or at least I assume that he prevails - perhaps he doesn’t. I haven’t finished the book yet.) This book has gotten rave reviews and I have found it fun so far but I don’t think that it has the literary merit of my first two choices.

Melissa's Book Selections

1) The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

Copyright 1966 by Robert A. Heinlein (still modern......)

In 2074, Lunar City on the moon is a thriving community, but an unusual one. It's a penal colony run by the United Nations Lunar Authority. Convicts are transported to the Moon to work for the Authority. It's a one way trip of course, for after a few months or years the transportees can no longer handle the higher gravity of Earth itself. What the colonists don't know is that if the Authority continues to exploit the limited lunar resources as it has been doing, the colony will survive only a few more years.
There's a warden and a few guards, but there are no real rules. After all the convicts can't escape to anywhere and they must cooperate with the Warden to the ensure the exchange of their labours for the essentials of life.
So it's clearly time for a change, a revolution. However, our hero, Manuel Garcia O'Kelly, computer engineer par excellence, is uninterested. He'd like the society to change, but he believes that there is no chance of a successful rebellion against the Earth authorities. He's more interested in chatting with the intelligent computer he's discovered and living a comfortable life with his wives and co-husbands.
But the beautiful, intelligent and passionate Wyoming Knott and the brilliant Professor Bernardo De La Paz involve him in their activism and finally, when he realises that there is indeed a chance of success, in their conspiracy.
Now he's committed and he'll drag his family, his friends and the whole of Luna into a desperate, no-holds battle against the forces of Earth.
This is a definitive work of classic SF. It's got space travel, atomic drives, artificial intelligence, revolution, lunar colonies, rough and tough heroes and strong, sensitive heroines. And, oh yes, variations of polygamy featured as providing a stronger family structure than a traditional nuclear marriage.
He gives you action and adventure but as you read the novel, you're forced to consider, in this new world, new ways of thinking about old problems (and that is what SF is all about).
One particularly enjoyable aspect of this novel is that Manual O'Kelly isn't the supremely competent, well-read and irredeemably arrogant archetypical Heinlein hero. Indeed our hero spends much of his time somewhat in the dark and being led by those who want the best out of him.
Heinlein dwells a little, as was his wont, on cosmetics, but happily his hero specifically avoids them, except where justified for the purposes of disguise.
And of course, there's the Holmes Mark IV Mod I computer that has become self-aware and without whom the revolution would be impossible.

2) American Psycho Bret Easton Ellis

Set in Manhattan and beginning on April Fools' Day 1989, American Psycho spans roughly three years in the life of wealthy young investment banker Patrick Bateman. Bateman, 26 years old when the story begins, narrates his everyday activities, from his daily life among the upper-class elite of New York to his forays into murder by nightfall.
Bateman comes from a privileged background, having graduated from Philips Exeter Academy, Harvard (class of 1984), and then Harvard Business School (class of 1986). He works as a vice president at a Wall Street investment company and lives in an expensive Manhattan apartment on the Upper West Side. He embodies the 1980s yuppie culture. Through present tense stream-of-consciousness narrative he describes his conversations with colleagues in bars and cafes, his office, and nightclubs, satirizing the shallow vanity of Manhattan yuppies.
The first third of the book contains no violence (except for subtle references apparent only in retrospect), and is simply an account of what seems to be a series of Friday nights, as Bateman documents traveling with his colleagues to a variety of nightclubs, where they snort cocaine, drink a variety of alcoholic beverages, critique fellow clubgoers' clothing, trade fashion advice, and question one another on proper etiquette.
Beginning with the second third of the book, Bateman begins to describe his day-to-day activities, which range from committing brutal violence to such mundanities as renting videotapes and making dinner reservations. Bateman's stream of consciousness is occasionally broken up by chapters in which Bateman directly addresses the reader in order to critique the work of 1980s musicians, specifically Genesis, Huey Lewis and the News and Whitney Houston. His passion for blandness sits alongside his attention to sartorial detail, his desire to appear normal and the lurid detailing of sex and violence. The effect is to create a world of surfaces, where Bateman seems to exist with no internal life whatsoever, even though he is the narrator.
As the book progresses, Bateman's control over his violent urges deteriorates. His murders become increasingly sadistic and complex, progressing from stabbings to drawn out sequences of torture. His mask of normality appears to slip as he introduces stories about serial killers into casual conversations, and confesses his murderous activities to his co-workers. In every case the context for his "confessions" seems to override the information he is imparting. People react as if Bateman is joking with them, appear not to hear him, or otherwise completely misunderstand him ("murders and executions" is mistaken for "mergers and acquisitions"). As the book nears its conclusion, These incidents illustrate Bateman's heavily medicated mental state and draw into question whether he has actually committed any of the murders he has described. The reader is left with a sense of uncertainty about what is real and who is a reliable witness, creating an acute sense of Bateman's isolation.

3. My Name is Red Orhan Pamuk

The main characters in the novel are miniaturists in the Ottoman Empire. The events revolve around the murder of one of the painters, as related in the first chapter. From then on, Pamuk — in a postmodern style reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges — plays with the reader and with literary conventions in general.
The novel's narrator changes in every chapter. In addition to character-narrators, the reader will find unexpected voices such as the corpse of the murdered, a coin, several painting motifs, and the color red. The novel blends mystery, romance, and philosophical puzzles, opening a window on the reign of Ottoman Sultan Murat III during nine snowy winter days in the Istanbul of 1591.
Enishte Effendi, the maternal uncle of Kara (Black), is reading the Book of the Soul by Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya, a famous Sunni commentator on the Qur'an, and continuous references to it are made throughout the book. The most important of these is the fact that part of the novel is narrated by Elegant Effendi, a murdered miniaturist. Al-Jawziyya argues, in the same fashion as Islamic doctrine in general, that the souls of the dead linger on earth and can hear the living.
Pamuk compares illustrations with the afterlife in the sense that people aspire to achieve a sense of eternity through both. The murdered Elegant Effendi accused his murderer of sacrilegious illustrations offending Allah or God. Is true art an expression of the individual artist or is true art a close to perfect representation of the divine in which the individual artist has succeeded to overcome his personal vanity? This question becomes a question of existential meaning in Pamuk's tale.tale.