All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Sometimes, the best books can result in the shortest book reviews. Doerr's work here, the story of a young blind French girl and a young German orphan who is a bit of an engineering savant, is compelling, readable, beautiful. The story weaves back and forth between Marie and Frederick with ease, and balances the intricacies of their stories with the overarching themes that permeate any novel that involved World War II.
The book has everything you could want - great, beautiful, descriptive writing. A plot that is complex and interesting, but pushes you to keep reading it, to decipher it, to reach its conclusion. Characters, both and primary and supplementary, that are amazingly complex and interesting, tragic and heroic. This was one of the best books I've read this year.
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua FerrisMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Like the other books by Ferris that I've read, this is a quirky read, amusing in parts, but also comments on some aspects of modern society in such fashion to give any reader pause. The basic premise of the book is original - a dentist finds out that someone has "stolen his identity," not in the usual sense, but in creating a webpage for his dental practice, a Twitter account, a Facebook page - and from those social media platforms is promoting some ancient cult/religion. Such is the background for the story (which provides the awesome term of calling a smartphone a "me-machine"), that is really about the crisis of Dentist, Paul O'Rourke, his excessive self-conscious behavior and internal neuroticism, and his attempts to belong to something in his own world. Witty, amusing, and reflective at times, a fun book to read all things considered.
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