The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Unfortunately, the title of my blog isn't something creative that I came up with on my own. It is the name of a book. Luckily though, it is an excellent book! I couldn't put this book down and I already want to read it again.

In a typical upscale apartment building on a prosaic fashionable street in Paris amongst the vapid elite live two notably interesting people. At first glance, one wouldn't notice anything exceptional about either of these characters - and one probably wouldn't notice anything exceptional with a second glance. However, under further scrutiny, it might be noticed that these two characters are much more interesting and much less conventional than their stereotype suggests.

A concierge who understands philosophy and loves art masquerades as merely a concierge - and a little girl who is surprisingly insightful about both the importance and the triviality of much of what the adults around her are consumed with hides her concern and derision behind the fact that she is just a little girl.

However, these highly regarded characteristics are not hard to hide at all when nobody ever looks for them.

Read this book.

In other news: Bill O'Reilly doesn't like the fact that Jennifer Aniston thinks it is okay for single women to have children; Montessori School of Dentistry let's students discover their own root canal procedures (that's a lie - an Onion headline that I couldn't resist); Facebook is being urged to add "panic" buttons to all its pages by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center (CEOP for short); and President Obama says the biggest threat to U.S. security is the possibility of terrorists obtaining a nuclear weapon. Go figure.