#the elegance of the hedgehog by muriel barbery

[cynthiabertelsen]

The Dying of the French Concierge

Last Days of an Iconic French Cultural Figure The Concierge (Photo by Robert Doisneau) This photo hangs on a wall in my kitchen. It sums up the stereotypical essence of traditional concierges of the past. I stayed once in a garret in Paris on the Île Saint-Louis for a month. Unlike the woman in Robert Doisneau’s iconic photo, the building’s concierge hid in her loge mostly, so I rarely saw…

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#Concierges #Confessions of a Concierge #France #Muriel Barbery #Paris #Robert Doisneau #The Elegance of the Hedgehog

[stijlw]

currently reading in storms of steel by ernst jünger and l'élégance du hérisson by muriel barbery

#currently reading #SCAN #upload #ernst jünger #muriel barbery #storm of steel #the elegance of the hedgehog #limited edition 2 for the price of 1 scan

[brianafrance17]

"The body is no longer a prison, your spirit roams the clouds, you possess the power, happy days are in store, in this new birth."

Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog (233)

#muriel barbery #the elegance of the hedgehog

[croutonbynight]

"I have finally concluded, maybe that's what life is about: a lot of despair, but also the odd moment where time is no longer the same. It's as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never. Yes, that's it, an always within never."

-Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

#books #muriel barbery #the elegance of the hedgehog #book quotes #literature #hopeful #inspiration

[claar-bookdragonwitch]

#quotes #favorite quotes #favorite books #muriel barbery #the elegance of the hedgehog

[litandlifequotes]

I may be indigent in name, position, and in appearance, but in my own mind I am an unrivaled goddess.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

#muriel barbery #the elegance of the hedgehog #book #book quote #quote #words #reading

[a-stone-in-flight]

life's beautiful fragility

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong / Evening Landscape with Two Men, Caspar David Friedrich / The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery / Bouquet of Roses, Pierre-Auguste Renoir / Time is a Mother, Ocean Vuong / The Fall of Icarus, Bernard Picart / The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery

#parallels #web weaving #on life #on humanity #on beauty #ocean vuong #on earth we're briefly gorgeous #the elegance of the hedgehog #muriel barbery #words #art

[mehreenkhan]

Five times a day, I make tea.

I do this because I like the warmth in my hands, like the feeling of self-directed kindness.

(from Leila Chatti's poem, Tea)

Some may call me a pessimist, but I am not. There is nothing gained from loss.

I drink tea in the shade and believe in poetry. I am a zealot for optimism.

(from Chris Abani's piece, Pilgrimage)

When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things.

- Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

What else is beautiful:

Your hands, at the end of a long day, carrying a cup of tea.

(from Aria Aber's Rilke and I)

I had tea.

I then spent a long time in a bookshop. A quiet evening.

-Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice

#tea poems #tea aesthetic #love poems #poetry blog #dark acadamia aesthetic #light acamedia #tea mood board #dark moodboard #home moodboard #cosy #cottagecore #desiblr #desi academia #desi aesthetic #dark academia #mehreen khan #love moodboard #tea and books #poetry aesthetic #english literature #classical literature #leila chatti #virginia woolf

[soracities]

Hiiiiii. Can I ask for some book advice? I'm going to Paris soon and I'd love to bring something to read with me, something that's either set in there or has parisienne vibes (this is very vague, I know). Do you know anything like that? Thank you so much, love your blog always 💘

i don't know about the parisienne vibes but for books set in paris i would try any of the following: the elegance of the hedgehog by muriel barbery, the phantom of the opera by gaston leroux (bc OF COURSE), paris when it's naked by etel adnan, a parisian affair and other stories by maupassant (settings are a bit more varied iirc but i really like him)

#if anybody has more recs please feel free to add them in!!! #i dont know how you feel about nonficition but im currently reading the existentialist cafe which is really enjoyable so far!! #realising i need to go back into reading more varied things again everything is intense or depressing or both #ask #anonymous #book recs

[nonalimmen]

"There’s so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature. Their indifferent majesty and our love for them teaches us how ridiculous we are and at the same time how deserving of life we can be, when we can honor this beauty that owes us nothing.

-Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

[booksinmythorax]

Some fiction books with sad endings to consider reading, and why

Raise your hand if you've ever been personally victimized by a book where the dog dies at the end. Raise your other hand if you literally flinch when you hear the words "Bridge to Terabithia".

So much of what we read for school in America, at least when I was growing up, was so sad, wasn't it? It was worse when the sadness wasn't earned, when the book was 100 pages of playing with puppies and then 20 pages of sobbing (looking at you, Where the Red Fern Grows).

Why all the bummers? There's a little bit of snobbishness at play there - speaking as someone who got an English degree in undergrad, there are a lot of people who don't believe a book has literary value if it has a happy ending. But there's something more, too: emotional education.

Globally, we're dealing with a lot of sadness in real life right now and have been for many years. There is a very real global mental health crisis happening, especially among young people. Sometimes it is good to use media as a fluffy escape from a grim reality, and as a species we do love a happy ending. I firmly believe in hope and love the hopepunk genre - but I also believe that everything doesn't work out the way we want it to all the time.

Sadness in fiction can function as practice or companionship for experiencing sadness in real life. If you're in the right mindset, it's important to read sad books.

It's not a spoiler to say that the endings of the following books are sad. These books deal with sad material or characters who struggle throughout. Also, a sad ending doesn't necessarily mean the hero doesn't win, that there is no hope for the characters or their world, or that everything is meaningless. It just means acknowledging that suffering is real, sacrifices are sometimes necessary, and at some point, we all have to grieve.

I've listed some titles you might want to peruse below the cut. The "sadness" in them varies book to book, from the personal to the global. I'm linking to The Storygraph for each title, in case you'd like to check the content warnings there. Please comment or send me an ask if you'd like to suggest a title to add to this list! I'd be especially grateful for titles written by Black authors, indigenous authors, and authors of color; titles by Jewish and Muslim authors; and/or titles that were not originally published in English.

-The His Dark Materials trilogy, ending with The Amber Spyglass, by Phillip Pullman (middle grade fantasy about a world where everyone's soul is external, expressed by an animal called a daemon, and a young girl who uncovers a scientific mystery with multiversal consequences)

-A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness (young adult fabulism about a boy whose mother has a terminal illness and who suddenly begins receiving visits from a large treelike monster late at night)

-The Elegance of the Hedgehog, written in French by Muriel Barbery and translated into English by Alison Anderson (adult contemporary fiction about a friendship between a middle-aged concierge and a teenage girl with depression, both of whom are secretly brilliant but pretend not to be)

-The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang (adult fantasy about a young woman who gains unimaginable power, paralleling the brutal occupation of China by Japan during World War II)

-The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (young adult historical fiction, narrated by a personified Death, about a girl who begins to steal books in Nazi Germany)

-Dear Martin by Nic Stone (young adult contemporary fiction about a Black American boy named Justyce who begins to write letters to Martin Luther King Jr. after he experiences police violence)

-House Arrest by K.A. Holt (middle grade contemporary fiction in verse about a boy who is put on house arrest for stealing money for his baby brother's medical bills)

-Anger Is a Gift by Mark Oshiro (young adult contemporary fiction about a Black American boy who gets panic attacks after his father is murdered by police, whose life is changed irreversibly again after police violence at his school)

-We Are Okay by Nina Lacour (young adult contemporary fiction about a young lesbian who finds herself reflecting on her grief alone in her dorm over winter break)

-The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (young adult contemporary fiction about a girl who witnesses the violent death of a friend at the hands of police, whose murder then starts a wave of national protests and personal turmoil)

-Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein (young adult historical fiction about two young women, one a spy, the other a pilot, during WWII)

-And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini (adult historical fiction about a poor family in Afghanistan who experiences far-reaching consequences after a father decides to sell his three-year-old daughter to a wealthy, childless couple)

-A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (adult historical fiction about two Afghani women who marry the same man decades apart after each experiences a family tragedy, as well as what comes after)

-Beloved by Toni Morrison (adult historical fiction about a formerly enslaved woman haunted by the living ghost of her daughter, who died violently as a baby)

-The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides (adult contemporary fiction about a family of sheltered girls who begin to commit suicide one by one)

#sad books #books and literature #booklr #bookblr #librarians of tumblr #librarian #librarians #book recs #book recommendations #books and reading #book reccs

[readingaway]

23 Books in 2023

I was tagged by @ninja-muse

There’s about 500 books I really want to get to this year, and 20 I specifically do not want to push off for another year (+3 goals) are

Cecilia by Fanny Burney (the book that’s been on my TBR the longest and I’ve owned for like 3 years now)

The Degenerates by J. Albert Mann

Sabriel by Garth Nix

The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty

A Room of One’s Own by Viriginia Woolf

The Year They Burned the Books by Nancy Garden

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Yume by Sifton Tracey Anipare

Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

Firebird by Susan Sellers (I mean, this one is kind of an obligation and it’s already been almost a year since I got it on publication day and got it signed and Susan is really nice and she wrote in the book that I should email her with my thoughts about it but my enormous reading list and thesis and moving got in the way)

Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse

A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan

Noor by Nnedi Okorafor

Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Tar Baby by Toni Morrison

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

The Aeneid by Vergil (translated by Shadi Bartsch)

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

I want to reread a book or series that I haven’t read in 5+ years

I want to read at least half of the books on my shelves that I haven’t read yet

I want to read 5 poetry collections (I have...4 unread collections on my shelves but three of those are enormous every-poem-they-ever-published collections so I will probably find smaller collections to read)

tagging: @backlogbooks, @motherofkittens94, @softironman, @kyliereads, @mintmentos, @books-and-cookies and anyone else who wants to

#tag games #reading goals #reading goals 2023

[bsdndprplplld]

Hello, dear! 🌻

I saw your post wanting book recommendations. I'm sorry for your previous struggles, but I hope this list may help you find something you love!

-"The Housekeeper and the Professor" by Yōko Ogawa (The professor is a mathematician!)

-if you like Vonnegut, you may like Haruki Murakami, specifically his older titles like "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" and "Norwegian Wood" (I feel these books do a good job of expanding on people's motivations and moods.)

-"The Elegance of the Hedgehog" by Muriel Barbery (Again, excellent at conveying emotions.)

-"Hunting and Gathering" by Anna Gavalda (This one is technically a romance - a genre which I personally would normally HATE - but it portrays such realistic characters, their struggles and their natural dialogue during fights that it actually felt more like I was reading about a collection of lives that I had the pleasure of spying on from above. I really love this book!)

-for WWI and WWII-themed titles, I'd recommend the Battlefield comics by Garth Ennis (He's SO good at writing believable characters and realistic dialogues.)

-if you don't mind high fantasy, any of the books in Terry Praychett's Discworld series about the wizards might be up your alley (You can read them independently without issue, or start from the beginning of any of the wizard titles. You can find a reading guide online! The wizards of his world are very regimented about how magic works - somewhat like mathematicians - and it's very funny.)

-the "Cemetery of Forgotten Books" series by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (I'd skip the 4th one - the main character/POV changed and I wasn't as impressed with the writing in that one - but the first 3 books are an absolute dream to read. The characters are so charming, lovable or completely horrifying, it feels like a wonderful foreign mystery series that takes place in 1940s Spain. It was really interesting to try to keep track of such a unique mystery amidst the second world war.)

I hope those help! Please enjoy your reading journey. ♡

hi, and thank you so much for the recommendations! I appreciate it a lot, those books sound really good

#books

[brianafrance17]

"My life is a model of banality"

Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog (224)

#muriel barbery #the elegance of the hedgehog

[chavisory]

So I'm rereading this book--A Strange Country, by Muriel Barbery (who also wrote The Elegance of the Hedgehog)--because for some reason I just can't get it out of my head lately, even though I'm not even sure whether or not I liked it the first time, or why I was disappointed in it.

One of the things I was always curious about was the alternate history and timeline of WWI/WWII...I always wanted some kind of explanation for whether...are we set in an entirely alternate Europe? Is it the influence of the Elves' conflict that meant the wars didn't happen the way we know them?

But now I wonder whether it was just to avoid trivializing what WWII was with "it was evil elves!" or avoid woobifying who Hitler actually was, or just entirely sidestep charges of minimizing the Holocaust.

Or to make the point that fascism can arise anywhere, that there was nothing magical or inevitable about it being Germany, or being Hitler?

#a strange country #muriel barbery

[vympr]

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery

the title is so quirky and the name sounds like a brunette white woman so without looking it up i bet this got nominated for a booker prize. okay well it didn't but it got a few French lit prizes so i count this as a win for me

#mean book asks