Hedgehog's prickly delight

Once again, I'm pushing the boundaries of "happy" choices with this suggestion, but my book club all enjoyed The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery.  There is loss in this story to be sure, but the theme is that art, friendship, and French pastries make it all worthwhile.  You will need both a dictionary and kleenex to finish this translation of a French bestseller.

Hedgehog tells two stories.  Paloma is an intelligent, wealthy, and depressed twelve year considering suicide.  Renee is the reclusive landlady in Paloma's Parisian apartment.  Renee pretends to be stupid, but secretly spends her days consuming art, literature, philosophy and music.  The story alternates between the two interesting characters as they ponder the meaning of their lives and become friends. 

Calgary Public Libary has an excellent audio version of the story with two fine actresses reading the alternating parts.  Using the Overdrive service, you can download the story onto your iPod.  My house was never cleaner than when I tidied while listening- I didn't want to stop!

Happiness is an e-reader!

I bought an e-reader for vacations (no more suitcase full of books for me!) and found it useful for travelling to work as well. The reader can be held in one hand if the train is crowded, and it's much lighter and smaller to cart around. My library offers e-books for download, so in keeping with this blog's theme, I searched for "happiness". Up popped The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin. I've seen this book in other people's laps and they were smiling, so I've put a hold on a copy for myself.

My library, Calgary Public Library, loans free electronic print books for downloading onto your e-reader. To get them, you need a suitable e-reader (more about that in a moment), a USB cable, a CPL library card, and a little time to download some software. The collection of e-books is called Overdrive, and you find it on our website at http://calgary.lib.overdrive.com/. You download software called Adobe Editions to manage the e-books, which is required by the publishers to protect copyright. Then you search for something to read. I often use the advanced search feature to limit to items that are checked in. Otherwise, you can place holds for a book just like in the regular library catalogue. The e-book is downloaded to your computer using a checkout system, and then transferred to your e-reader. (You can also download audio files to to listen to stories on your iPod or MP3 player.)

The first step is to pick which e-reader to buy ; there are pros and cons to each. The Amazon Kindle, though it offers the ease of wireless downloads, is proprietary and won't work with Overdrive. A list of supported devices can be found at http://www.overdrive.com/resources/drc/ Check with your own library to see what e-books they offer, and which devices are supported. And then have fun squeezing reading into more places in your life!

Wintery Swedish character study

Not happy, but interesting!

Been too busy in the kids' section- it was time to head back for some adult books.

We just read The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson at bookclub. Although not a "happy" book, it was enjoyed by 90% of the club. It's the story of two women Katri and Anna in wintery Sweden. Single minded Katri wants money from Anna to buy a boat for her brother. Anna is a well known illustrator of childrens' books, and not the easy mark she first appears to be. A quick read about how two interesting characters affect each other. Written in 1982 by the childrens' author of the Moomintrolls, this is a recent translation.

In the car, we're listening to Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris. It is short stories about animals who act like humans, which is a clever premise that makes the human foibles more apparent and droll. I recommend the bookcd because it's read by fine character voices.

Our Maverick

My city Calgary is planning to read Mavericks : The Incorrigible History of Alberta by Aritha Van Herk this fall during One Book One Calgary.

Every family has one. Our maverick is my great-grandmother Leta May Bailly. Born in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia in 1889, she was friends with local boy Robert Silver. He moved to Calgary. Her father, a strict Lutheran, told Leta she couldn't travel west on the train alone and unmarried to follow him. Leta did, and they married in Calgary on November 6, 1912. There they lived in a house at the corner of Memorial Drive and Edmonton Trail. They filled the house with their son Bert, a Boston Terrier named Buddy, and two Indian motorcycles.

When Leta came to Calgary she cut her Gibson Girl locks in favour of a short bob. She wore mens' trousers while she rode her Indian motorcycle into the mountains for picnics. Leta liked the trousers so much she had a dressmaker make pairs in all kinds of fabrics, including a pink satin pair for bridge parties.

By the time my Mom was born, her "Nana" had given up the Indian motorcycle. She ate her Pot of Gold chocolates and chainsmoked, while her budgie Joey sat on the rim of her glasses. She died in 1963 so I never met her. When I got married, though, my Uncle Al made us a poster size blowup of our favourite family photo- Nana sitting on her Indian motorcyle at the garage.

Who's your family maverick?

Stealing from the Young Adult section

Now my book club doesn't like fantasy much, so I wait until the summer to indulge. The best fantasy going these days is on the kids' side of the library. It's fun, imaginative, and fits the requirements for happy book choices in that the main characters survive to the end of the book intact!

My most anticipated summer novel is Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins due to be released August 24. I know people who have scheduled that day off work to read it! Personally, I stayed up all night to read the second in this series- Catching Fire. You need to start with the first of the trio- The Hunger Games.

Katniss lives in a future world in which the poor provinces serve the central city, including sending teenagers to fight to the death in a televised reality show. As Katniss struggles to survive, she is unwittingly pulled into a rebellion. This is edge of the chair exciting, so set aside a chunk of time for this book.

Another favourite young adult writer is Shannon Hale. She writes about teenage girls in fantasy worlds. They are like feminist fairy tales, and reading them makes me wish that I could have given them to myself long ago.

I'll recommend The Book of a Thousand Days. Dashti, a servant girl, is locked into a tower with her mistress because of the lady's refusal to marry an evil lord. The story is about how Dashti finds her strength to survive.

Hale also wrote the Princess Academy and The Goose Girl. They are engaging reads, and will help you remember being a teenager.

My third recommended book is Cornelia Funke's The Thief Lord. Two orphan brothers are threatened with separation. They run away to Venice, Italy because their late mother described it so lovingly. A thief lord gives them shelter in an abandoned movie theatre. But who is he?

The possibilities

This is what our book club considered for next year's reading list. I'm not guaranteeing happiness, but thought other clubs might be interested in our shortlist!

Happy summer reading


Beatrice & Virgil/ Yann Martel

Bonobo Handshake/ Vanessa Woods

Brahma's Dream/ Shree Ghatage

Butterfly /Sonya Hartnett

Death Comes for the Archbishop/ Willa Cather

Five Quarters of the Orange/ Joanne Harris

Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel/ Jeannette Walls

Hitch-22: A Memoir/ Christopher Hitchens

Juliet, Naked/ Nick Hornby

Last Night in Twisted River/ John Irving

Love, Loss and What I Wore/ Ilene Beckerman

Native Son/ Richard Wright

People of the Book/ Geraldine Brooks

The Butcher and the Vegetarian/ Tara Austen Weaver

The Demon-Haunted World/ Carl Sagan

The Elegance of the Hedgehog/ Muriel Barbery

The Forgotten Garden/ Kate Morton

The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet/ Jamie Ford

The Lacuna/ Barbara Kingsolver

The Slap/ Christos Tsiolkas

The True Deceiver/ Tove Jansson

The Unit/ Nini Holmqvist

Three Cups of Tea/ Greg Mortenson

Tweet tweet thou tortoise

And so in June another succesful year of book club wraps up, and we face the bleak prospect of no Velvet cake for 3 months. Our exploration of social media at work is also coming to an end with Twitter as the last topic. Twitter allows short blog posts of up to 140 characters. My main use is to keep up developments in the Harry Potter universe on Mugglenet. This points to it's main attraction- its currency- as opposed to the indexing delay on Google searches. Plus they have great graphics! Anyway, as a wrap up, here are some imagined Tweets:

• Come thou tortoise by Jessica Grant is a hilarious read, similar to A curious incident of the dog in the Night-time, 'tho a few found it quirky
• Flavia's back in The weed that strings the hangman's bag by Alan Bradley (sequel to Sweetness at the bottom of the pie)
• Excellent cake recipes in All cakes considered by Melissa Gray, which my son generously gifted Grandma
• Me talk pretty one day by David Sedaris, wonky true family stories about an American living in France,
• Bill Bryson is a sure thing with his humorous travel essays like Notes from a small island
• Carl Hiaasen is bizarrely funny if you're feeling cranky about the horrible things people do to our environment