The Best Book?

I love to read - always have. And I love my monthly book club discussions. And I love it when someone recommends a good book.

When I saw my sister at Thanksgiving she loaned me All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. She said it was one of the best books ever and one where she would not have changed a single sentence. Coming from Susan this is a major recommendation.

I just finished it. And I know it's a book that will stay with me for a long time. With 530 pages it's obvious I can't sum it up in just a couple of sentences. But the story starts at the beginning of World War II and ends in 1974. Two of the main characters are a young blind girl living with her father in Paris, and a young German orphan conscripted into Hitler's army. And radio plays a third important character in the novel.

Once a bookseller at Barnes and Noble told members of my book club to always discuss a book's title and always discuss the first sentence. So I do that in my mind even if the book is not one we've chosen for our meetings.

I kept thinking about the title of this book as I read chapter after chapter. There seem to be so many levels of light - seen and unseen. But it was on page 529 where "my" explanation jumped off the page.
It's a long paragraph but part of it says: "And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfenning might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted all still reverberating within it."

Those sentences pretty much sum up my feelings about the "after"…. and how every person we've ever met, every loved one we've ever lost, every friend near and far, every interaction with others shapes who we are. And my "they" brush against me even after death. The energy, the memory, their light is out there…..a part of the current of life. At least for me.

I loved this book - and I'm now getting out of my pajamas and heading to the library to see what else I can find by Anthoy Doerr.