From the Bookshelf of Constant Reader…

All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr

Start date: June 15, 2015

Finish date: July 1, 2015

Discussion: Reading List

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Reading List

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What Members Thought

Oct 11, 2016 Ken rated it it was amazing

Shelves: finished-in-2016, contemporary

It's unusual for me to enjoy a book this long that is not a Russian novel. But Doerr pulled it off. How did he pull it off? For one thing, very few of his chapters ran longer than four pages. And some of them read like prose poems, especially the shorter ones. It's not often you come across writing like that in a sprawler.

The plot goes back and forth in more ways than one. First, there's the blind French girl and the radio engineer German boy plots playing pas de deux. And then there's the time ...more

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Feb 07, 2016 Patti Barber rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2016

I loved this book! Give it a try if you haven't read it yet .... You will thank me! ...more

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Nov 06, 2016 William rated it liked it

Shelves: 2016

A good story well told. I enjoyed the story, but in the pantheon of WW2 books, it ranks somewhere in the pack. I fail to see any overarching theme or point of view that separates it. I found the diamond a bit contrived and a bit too 'magical' and the character of the German with the lymphoma in need of saving was a distraction which in my view did not move the narrative forward.
It is indeed a good page turner, no more, no less. The prose is often beautiful and the main characters, particularly ...more

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Apr 11, 2017 Laurel Bradshaw rated it really liked it

Shelves: chunky-450, france, historical-fiction, world-war-ii, daytimers-book-club, literary-fiction, nrgm-selections

Review may contain spoilers........

I liked this book a lot, but I didn't LOVE it. Definitely literary fiction - characterized by the writing rather than plot or characters. Lots of rich, beautiful, detailed descriptions about anything and everything. Plotwise, it constantly moves back and forth in time and point of view which may be distracting/discouraging for some readers. I didn't have a problem with that, although occasionally I would find myself wondering "who is this character again?" It b Review may contain spoilers........

I liked this book a lot, but I didn't LOVE it. Definitely literary fiction - characterized by the writing rather than plot or characters. Lots of rich, beautiful, detailed descriptions about anything and everything. Plotwise, it constantly moves back and forth in time and point of view which may be distracting/discouraging for some readers. I didn't have a problem with that, although occasionally I would find myself wondering "who is this character again?" It builds up to being (or could have been) a great love story, but when the two main characters finally meet, it is late in the tale and all too brief. So that was something of a let-down for me. Also, the plot device of the valuable diamond - the story of the curse never really went anywhere. The diamond was just another "character" to be followed through the story. You could almost think of this book as a collection of short stories. Some of the characters were revisited at the end so you knew what happened to them. Others were dropped and never reappeared, or their appearance in the first place was just part of the description, but not really relevant to the plot. So bottom line - beautiful writing, lots of gaps in the plot, and an ending that made you wonder what the point was of all that the characters went through.

Book description: Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.
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Dec 27, 2014 Temple Dog rated it liked it

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Feb 14, 2015 Alan rated it liked it

Shelves: wwi-ii-and-korea, pulitzer-prize

The oft-mentioned beautiful prose tends to be overdone, and self absorbrd, sort of "see, isnt this great writing?" and the moral bashing is laid on a little thick too. I expected to like this more. Some do. ...more

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