March was a wild, crazy month so I didn't do as much reading as I had hoped. I think I purchased more books that I'll be able to read in the next few months. I do know I checked out so many books from the library that I've had to return, unread. Not to worry, I put them all back on my hold request list which means I'll get 5 or 6 books at the same time from the library. I welcome the challenge!
The first book I read (and the one I spent the most time on) was All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel Anthony Doerr. This beautifully told story tells the story of two characters; Marie Laure, a blind 14-year-old French girl and Werner, a German Orphan and their lives through WWII. I loved how Doerr made you feel like you were blind when he spoke of Marie Laure. The way he wove in the story of Marie Laure's locksmith father who builds miniature models of Paris to help his daughter find her way around town to Werner, a gadget-obsessed German whose confusion about the Nazi's invasion and his close ties with his younger sister made me want to slow down and never stop reading. I missed Marie Laure and Werner by the end of the this torturous story but I most especially missed Doerr's writing.
“To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields, directing their huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears families sniffling around hurricane lamps in cellars, crows hopping from pile to pile, flies landing on corpses in ditches; she hears the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth’s crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides, and the outer islands holding steady against the swirling tides; she hears cows drink from stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green water of the Channel; she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun. She hears her snails in the grotto drag their bodies over the rocks.”
“To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields, directing their huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears families sniffling around hurricane lamps in cellars, crows hopping from pile to pile, flies landing on corpses in ditches; she hears the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth’s crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides, and the outer islands holding steady against the swirling tides; she hears cows drink from stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green water of the Channel; she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun. She hears her snails in the grotto drag their bodies over the rocks.”
The next book, I read was The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac: A Novel Sharma Shields. I LOVED this book. The story starts with Eli Roebuck at nine years old and his mother walking into the woods with "Mr. Krantz", a large, hairy and very strange man. As Eli grows, he becomes obsessed with finding Mr. Krantz and proving the existence of the Sasquatch. You are taken on a ride through a mystical world full of unicorns, lake monsters, ghosts and hexes. This was a fun book and a great read.
Fun Fact: At the end of the book, the author thanks Grover Krantz, a Washington State University professor who devoted his career to the hunt for the Sasquatch and in college (I went to WSU), I volunteered to work in the Museum of Anthropology which was filled with Sasquatch artifacts.
Fun Fact: At the end of the book, the author thanks Grover Krantz, a Washington State University professor who devoted his career to the hunt for the Sasquatch and in college (I went to WSU), I volunteered to work in the Museum of Anthropology which was filled with Sasquatch artifacts.
My final read was The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing Marie Kondo. Everyone is so in love with this book but ehhh, I didn't find the passion. I get what she is saying about only keeping things that give you a spark but I have kids. Everything they touch gives them a spark. They want to keep the eleven-billionty stuffed animals they have and they want to bring in more. Controlling their clutter is a huge challenge of mine. Also I'm not sure that I have the time to gather all the books in my house and then sort through them one by one to decide which ones to keep. I barely have time to sort through a drawer in the bathroom while the kids are taking a bath. So while I get the idea of this book, I'm not sure I have the time right now to put her advice into practice. I might just be living with clutter for awhile longer.
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