New reads:

This week, I'm reading All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. Have you read it? You probably have. I am probably the last person on the planet to read it. In fact, I'm reading it as part of the 26 books to read in 2015 project (more on that here). It's my pick for #20: a book "everyone" but you has read.

I'm not quite finished but I've been reading a little every evening and am really enjoying it. Here's what it's about, in case you're interested:

"Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum's most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure's converge.

Doerr's 'stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors' (San Fransisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer 'whose sentences never fail to thrill (Los Angeles Times)."

It's beautifully written and a really rich story. I am invested in the characters and since I know where it's all headed (it's 1944 France, after all), I find myself dreading the ending that was all too common to so many people.

It's a great book. I can see why people are raving about it. If you haven't picked it up yet, you should definitely carve out some time to spend with these characters.