All The Light We Cannot See | Anthony Doerr

(And everything else he's written, including his latest Cloud Cuckoo Land)

I can absolutely swim around in the prose this writer creates. I think he could write up a grocery list and I'd find it spellbinding.

All The Light is one of my all-time favorite reads. The writing is exquisite--some people are just better at the whole writing thing. I've had the chance to hear him speak a couple of times (don't miss the chance if you get it) and it's made me enjoy his books even more. He seems to deliver his lectures from the balls of his feet, literally bouncing. And they are lectures. He doesn't just sit and talk about how he works or what the book is about. One was a grad-school level lecture that included photos of things like butterfly wings and fly eyes, all to demonstrate how there is so much in the world that we cannot see. Another was titled something like "Six Lessons in Epic Failure" that started with a story of a failed Halloween costume when he was a kid (in Bath, Ohio!!) and then went on to demonstrate his editing process which was hilarious and insightful in equal measure. It took him 10 years to write All The Light, so you know he's very thorough. Apparently it takes 6 months to write a New Yorker short story. What?? Proof point proof point that I don't have what it takes to be a fiction writer.

I was bowled over by the complexity of Cloud Cuckoo Land and wondered whether I'm really smart enough to read Doerr, but he doesn't seem like a judgy kind of person so I'm just going to keep on doing it. Doerr has also written some nonfiction which is lovely, especially Four Seasons in Rome, which is about his time in Rome while on a fellowship from American Academy of Arts and Letters--a huge and prestigious award that he didn't even apply for, and which he found out about just after his wife delivered twins. That was a great story in itself!