All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

I brought this along to read on a six-hour flight from NYC to San Francisco. When the plane landed, I had just hit the 50% mark and was sorry I hadn't purchased a longer flight: perhaps to France, to Saint-Malo, to wander the streets looking for a little iron gate that led to the sea.

I had to sleep once before I could finish it. I fell asleep with my Kindle in my hands, and my dreams took place within the world of the story: the big house with the spiral staircase running through its center, coiled like a seashell; the boy in the hotel cellar fiddling with the innards of a broken radio, hearing static, then, suddenly, music; Marie-Laure's fingers restlessly exploring the model of the walled city.

This is a book that succeeds on every level. The language is vivid, immersive, astonishing in its ability to draw you into different perspectives. (I particularly loved Marie-Laure's chapters, described exactly the way she experiences the world: in sound, texture, smell, imagined colors -- a vast richness, felt with all her senses, the polar opposite of how I had imagined blindness.) It has sentences, metaphors, moments that could stand beautifully alone, yet they combine to form a whole that fits together as neatly as a puzzle box. It's a powerful story that feels both revelatory and intimate, both devastating and inspiring. Both as small and as large as a single lifetime.

Wordy.

I guess there are people with highly visual imaginations, for whom every extra word is a Pollockian splash adding ever more vivid detail to a cluttered, I mean rich, canvas; people who think rococo “could use a little something.” Turns out I’m not one of those people, which is odd because I used to think I loved well-crafted sentences, and this book is chock full of them, but I also have a fondness for characters and relationships which were in short supply. Although Doerr beautifully describes actions — what is happening — I never felt like I understood the why. The characters were opaque. Affectless. The connections between them flimsy. I think the words crowded out the feels.

Not a good book to read on Kindle: I started compulsively checking the percent meter on every page, despairing at its lack of progress: 80%, still 80%, still, still, still, like that scene in Holy Grail where John Cleese is endlessly running toward the castle but never making progress. Then, mercifully, at 96%, when I still think I have a week to go, it ends! Hallelujah! And that was my favorite part: it ended early.