All the Light We Cannot See
discussion
Did anyone else have difficulty connecting with this book.
message 251:
by
Marie
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Nov 06, 2017 07:18PM
I did find it a bit difficult to follow in the beginning but then couldn't put it down. I found it helpful that each chapter was only one to three pages long - "just one more chapter"! I really loved this book and so did the majority in my book club. I'm so glad I read it.
reply
|
flag
Marie wrote: "I did find it a bit difficult to follow in the beginning but then couldn't put it down. I found it helpful that each chapter was only one to three pages long - "just one more chapter"! I really lov..."I loved this too about the chapters! Sometimes for me I get bored in the middle of a chapter when the chapters are super long, but that wasn't an issue with this book.
How is this topic still carrying on!?!? It's annoying after so many months lol.... spoiler alert .... it had potential but it was like watching grass grow to finish it!
I thought Doerr did an amazing job, as always, with how he weaved the words together--almost magically. This book flows unlike any I've ever read before. Sure, there are some areas where I would've done things differently, but there always are (I think it's called reader's anticipation). Overall, however, it is one of my most favorite reads and will be on my list again this year...I'm boring that way.
An incredible book. Not too many people I know didn't like it. Most of my friends and book club people loved it. It resonating so deeply with me. I recommend it to everyone.
I love this book, i read it a few years ago and have reread it several times since. After reading the book the first time I have a few questions and felt like i was missing something so a few months later I reread the book and was able to understand the true deeper meaning of what happen. Realizing this made me cry. The key piece to this whole book is the stone her father is given from the museum. Even though the stone seems like such a small part it is the key part to the whole story. I would recommend that every person reads this book at least one in there life because it is an amazing book.
Some books are meant to be read over and over.
I liked it but I expected a bit more based on what I previously heard.
Christy wrote: "Susan wrote: "This book has great ratings, but I could never get involved with it. And it went on for soooo long. Did anyone else have a negative reaction to this?"I really had high hopes for thi..."
What Christy said. Stunningly overrated.
Mark wrote: "I agree that the book was overvalued. The problem I had with it, in addition to the pointless time shifting of chapters, is that apparently Doerr's intent to produce a "blockbuster" induces him to ..."Yes, yes, yes to all of Mark's observations. Spot on.
Colin wrote: "How is this topic still carrying on!?!? It's annoying after so many months lol.... spoiler alert .... it had potential but it was like watching grass grow to finish it!"I thought the end was confusing RE: the key, the stone???
Susan wrote: "This book has great ratings, but I could never get involved with it. And it went on for soooo long. Did anyone else have a negative reaction to this?"
Yes. Dragged on. Terrible plot. And the characters very unengaging.
I wish I had my time back that I spent reading this book - it was full of poorly developed, abused characters and so many factual/continuity problems.
I bought this book because I thought the name was interesting but I couldn't understand the ending and in the middle of the book I lost the point of it!
I wanted to love this book, I really did. Unfortunately, it took all my strength to finish it. I never stop reading a book, so that I can accurately review it, and I always hope that it would get better at the end. All the Light We Cannot See did not. All the characters were flat and I had no interest in them whatsoever. There was nothing special about them that made me connect to them or stick with them. Maybe it would have helped if it was written in first person because the characters were so distant. They did not take any risks, they did not change at all. Werner and Marie didn't even meet until the last like 50 pages. Honestly, I'm not sure what the point was of the characters' existence.
Every chapter was a page, and it kept switching perspectives of so many characters that I couldn't keep track. By the end of the book, I sadly could not remember half of them. It's safe to say this book isn't very memorable. I'm not sure why people like it so much and gave it so many awards. Also, I wanted more of the war, the fighting. I understand the book is about innocence, but it was too innocent. They are working with the resistance, but they don't even know what they are resisting! Don't expect to learn about the war by reading this book.
I don't know, maybe adults would appreciate this book more, but I personally really didn't like it at all.
I know this is from 5 years ago, but i’ve just spent 2 hard days trying to connect with this book... i’m still listening tho... we’ll see
Yup - read my review - it’s a poorly written book.
I am so sad to see all the negative reviews. I adored this book. I thought it was magical and engaging. It just goes to show - to each their own. Taste in books is so individual and mysterious.
Leslie wrote: "I am so sad to see all the negative reviews. I adored this book. I thought it was magical and engaging. It just goes to show - to each their own. Taste in books is so individual and mysterious."This book did win an award, afterall, so you're clearly NOT alone.
Why would it make you sad - or is this a passive-aggressive way of trying to get people to change their minds and reassure you of your esteem of the novel?
Susan wrote: "I guess I'm really in the minority here -- a minority of one."Minority of 2** I picked this up years ago and dnf'ed at 150 pages then re picked it up recently and finished it and honestly don't get the hype? It wasn't garbage but it wasn't as good as I had hoped from reviews.
Susan wrote: "I guess I'm really in the minority here -- a minority of one."Nope. I thought it was terrible. 2 dimensional, cookie cutter characters. Not believable either
I found the book dull, with no depth, uselessly trying to be clever and emotional. I definitively did not connect. I wonder why people liked it so much.
Susan wrote: "This book has great ratings, but I could never get involved with it. And it went on for soooo long. Did anyone else have a negative reaction to this?"This book was hideously dreadful! I cannot seem to fathom the high ratings for it. I had an absolutely difficult time connecting with it. And here I thought it was just me! :)
The book was a huge disappointment. I stuck with it until the end as I wanted to badly enjoy what should have been a compelling interesting story. I'm at lost as to why the book was so highly reviewed. I had to convince myself to keep reading thinking that it would get better but no such luck. The book describes the lives of a blind French girl and a gadget obsessed German boy before and during World War II. Each chapter alternated between the two characters. This is where the story gets a little confusing as it flips back and forth . World War II is coming and the blind girl is cared for by her museum worker dad. The Nazi invasion begins and they flee there city of Saint-Malo. Move forward and a young German boy who loves radios begins to grow up and is recruited by the German camp. The kids grow older we jump ahead the father goes missing and the boy is now a soldier. Go back two years plus a month and the father is off on important mission his mentally unstable brother will care for the girl. Jump ahead two years, go back, no go forward, no go back.. The time periods that the chapters covered flipped flopped a bit and it was confusing. The two main characters eventually meet but are actually together for less than 10 pages. The ending had no resolution and left me thinking, so what was the point? So many people love this book that I feel guilty saying that for most of the book, I was thinking when will this book end. I was trying to figure if the author ever use connective phrases or some kind of narration. One minute your reading a story thread, then you are somewhere else in a totally disconnected narration. Have fun figuring out what is going on in this book. And what about the diamond? We are never told what happens to the stone. Was the author to busy writing his verbose account that he forgot to finish it. Five hundred pages of tedious, repetitious, boring nonsense. Enough said.
Agree with you completely. The plot is preposterous. The writing is pretty, the author turns a phrase well, but that means nothing without a good story. And it is a ridiculous story that basically goes nowhere. I read it to the very end. I couldn't tell you anything about it today, a few years later, other than it was about a blind girl, a boy who was a mechanical genius, and a diamond.
This is an amazing book that I chose for my bookclub on the advice of my librarian who called it a very special book. It certainly was that and those in my bookclub thanked me for choosing it. I, like some others, had a bit of a hard time getting into it at first. But then it suddenly took off and I wasn't able to put it down. I loved how it was written in short 1 to 3 page chapters. Which made it easy to read "just one more chapter" (again and again). In the end, I did go back and read the first few pages which then made sense when they didn't in the beginning. This is a treasure of a book and one I would highly recommend.
Susan wrote: "I guess I'm really in the minority here -- a minority of one."I had trouble with this one too, i was disappointed. and further disappointed that i was disappointed.
I found the story fascinating once it finally got up to speed. Anthony Doerr's mastery of writing made the book enjoyable, even during the slow scenes. Marie's struggles as a blind girl, and then young woman surviving, WWII in German-occupied France kept me turning the page all the way to the end. Unfortunately, I found the ending somewhat anti-climatic, but that seems to be a theme in war survival stories.
Hannah wrote: "Susan wrote: "I guess I'm really in the minority here -- a minority of one."I had trouble with this one too, i was disappointed. and further disappointed that i was disappointed."
Don't be disappointed that you were disappointed, Hannah - it was crap writing!
Frankly, I'm disappointed by all the people who have reading comprehension issues and feel the need to chime in here to defend the book or just say "I loved it" ... such insecurity!
I received this book as a gift one year and I read it out of obligation. I was happy to make it to the end so I could give it away in good conscience. I am not sure I would have read all the way to the end if I had borrowed the book from the library.
I thought it was a good read....not a fast read but a good one.
I wanted to like this book! The beginning of the book, the relationship of father and daughter. I thought I was going to enjoy the story, but it came to an abrupt end when her dad left, she was alone, blah blah, blah. Sorry. I tried to continue several times, but the story never picked up again. I did not finish it. As I get older, I don't feel obligated to finish a book that I don't enjoy.
I just was not captivated by this book like so many were. I do plan to re-read it to see if my mind just was not in the place for it . I recommend Alice Hoffman's "The World That We Knew" for WWII Historical fiction with magical elements.
I thought Marie-Laure threw the diamond into the ocean just before she left Saint-Malo. But at the end. she wonders if Werner took the diamond out of the wooden house model and there was only a key in the house. Can anyone explain this to me?
Reading this was a mixed bag of emotions, but overall, the book seemed unique with the poetic prose.
Susan wrote: "This book has great ratings, but I could never get involved with it. And it went on for soooo long. Did anyone else have a negative reaction to this?"on the contrary, I connected with it so well and felt so deeply with it that whenever I hear 'claire de la lune,' I remember the entire pain of the novel. as for its length, I agree with you to a certain degree; books have been written well below 300 pages that have penetrated hearts.
This book was special. We made an instant connection. You know, I read and finished it during the height of COVID-19 Pandemic where the entire world was on a lockdown.The plot alone reminds me of the way the higher officials solve this pandemic is similar to that World War 2. There are too much politics going on amid pandemic, instead of treating it as a health issue, encouraging more people to believe in science.
Linda wrote: "I thought Marie-Laure threw the diamond into the ocean just before she left Saint-Malo. But at the end. she wonders if Werner took the diamond out of the wooden house model and there was only a key..."I am also confused by this! Because I also thought that Marie-Laure had thrown it in the grotto before her escape with Werner.
Susan wrote: "This book has great ratings, but I could never get involved with it. And it went on for soooo long. Did anyone else have a negative reaction to this?"Yes I wanted to read it based on what everyone said but it was going on and on. I skipped it half way through and read spoilers and I was ok with that :)
Petrina wrote: "I cannot understand why everyone is gushing over this book. I love reading and this book did not enthrall me at all. I never connected with it. There was too much flowery language and so little plo..."I agree with your critique!
Samaneh wrote: "on the contrary, I connected with it so well and felt so deeply with it that whenever I hear 'claire de la lune,' I remember the entire pain of the novel. as for its length, I agree with you to a certain degree; books have been written well below 300 pages that have penetrated hearts."Clearly, you (and many other aficionados of this book) have challenges with reading comprehension. This entire discussion is for people who had trouble connecting with the book and thought it was a piece of poorly written garbage.
We don't really care to hear from people gushing over it -- there's enough of you in other places. The fact that many of us disliked this book should not invalidate your feelings about it and, quite frankly, we don't care that you liked it.
I agree that this book was difficult to connect with at first. I struggled with understanding the time jumps and switches between characters. Halfway through I started connecting more and getting a better grasp of the flow of the book. In the end I really enjoyed the book and cried, but it took time for it to grow on me.
Susan wrote: "This book has great ratings, but I could never get involved with it. And it went on for soooo long. Did anyone else have a negative reaction to this?"I agree it was overhyped in my opinion. The beginning of the story confused me between time and character jumps to the point I almost stopped reading since I was lost. Eventually it grew on me and I liked it. I want to reread it in the future since I may understand the plot more.
I loved the book, but it was definitely a slow build. I had to read it for school which is why I continued to put in the effort, but I could have seen myself giving up had it not been a requirement.
I found it waaaaaaay too long and repetitive. Marie-Laure seems to spend her entire life walking her fingers around models of towns or reading the same book again and again. And ditto Werner with triangulating radio signals. I also found the cold, clinical descriptions of injury, rape and death quite offputting - I don't want to read descriptions of suffering that seem to relish the victims' pain, but there is a happy medium between that and sounding as if the annihilation of hundreds of people is no more distressing than the destruction of a few flies.The constant time hops were difficult to track too. Although they did help in one way. I kept telling myself that the reason Marie Laure sounded so infantile was because we'd hopped back in time and she was still very young. It worked until one scene, where reference to her being 16 is followed a few paragraphs later by her behaving like a spoiled six year old. By the end of the book, her childishness and helplessness really started to grate on me - especially as she, the only blind character in the book, is the only one to behave in this babyish way.
I didn't connect with any of the characters. I felt no emotion when key characters died, and no sympathy or interest in those who survived. Perhaps it was because they all seemed so unaffected by their experiences during the war. If they're not bothered by all that separation, suffering and death, why would I need to waste any energy feeling compassion for them?
Some of the writing was beautiful, but the story itself left me cold. Which is such a shame, as I really, really wanted to like this book! And it seems such a waste of a brilliant title.
Maybe I feel kind of the same as you. It's a lovely story and so well-written, but I couldn't connect with it, at least not deeply. I mean the blind girl and her family were so unrealistically perfect, and the boy was so brilliant and brave. It was sort of a fairy tale. Even though it was in a real historical setting, the characters didn't seem like real people because they were idealized. Is that at all what you felt?
Sort of, but I didn't particularly like the plot, although I do like magical realism, and I did not think the writing was all that great.
all discussions on this book
|
post a new topic
All the Light We Cannot See (other topics)
All the Light We Cannot See (other topics)
Books mentioned in this topic
Life After Life (other topics)All the Light We Cannot See (other topics)
All the Light We Cannot See (other topics)
