a girl and her books

"You see, books fill the empty spaces. If I'm waiting for a bus, or am eating alone, I can always rely on a book to keep me company. Sometimes I think I like them more than people. People will let you down in life. They'll disappoint you and hurt you and betray you. But not books. They're better than life."
January 8
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery My friend in Australia sent me this and it was everything!  It’s not your usual narrative, but extremely well written and full of weighty and lofty ideas.  It has alternating narrators - the first a clandestinely high-cultured but lonely concierge at a bourgeois apartment building, and the second a twelve year old girl who lives on the fourth floor and is determined to document her profound thoughts and what beauty in the world she does see before she kills herself on her thirteenth birthday. This sentence took my breath away:“Do you know what a summer rain is?To start with, pure beauty striking the summer sky, awe-filled respect absconding with your heart, a feeling of insignificance at the very heart of the sublime, so fragile and swollen with the majesty of things, trapped, ravished, amazed by the bounty of the world.”

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

My friend in Australia sent me this and it was everything!  It’s not your usual narrative, but extremely well written and full of weighty and lofty ideas.  It has alternating narrators - the first a clandestinely high-cultured but lonely concierge at a bourgeois apartment building, and the second a twelve year old girl who lives on the fourth floor and is determined to document her profound thoughts and what beauty in the world she does see before she kills herself on her thirteenth birthday.

This sentence took my breath away:
“Do you know what a summer rain is?
To start with, pure beauty striking the summer sky, awe-filled respect absconding with your heart, a feeling of insignificance at the very heart of the sublime, so fragile and swollen with the majesty of things, trapped, ravished, amazed by the bounty of the world.”