Stop. Read these novels. Thank me later.

Anthony Doerr's novels don't interest me. But his writing is addictive anyway.

There is nothing about Anthony Doerr’s novels that interested me. Until I started reading one. His writing is something I simply must have in my life.

A couple of years ago, I picked up a novel called “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr. It’s about a young French girl who is blind and trying to survive on her own in Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War, and a young German boy in the same war who discovers an old radio and learns to fix it. Boring.

But, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 and I wanted to know why. So I bought it. Five pages into the novel, I understood. The writing was delicious. It was addictive. It reads like Pulitzer-winning prose.

Doerr’s plot and characters were good, I suppose, but not the kind of thing that normally excites me. But, the writing. God, the writing! The way Doerr constructs sentences and describes the world and how it interacts with his characters, is hard for me to put into words. Perhaps, that’s why I’ve never won a Pulitzer Prize.

Leaflets

At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. ‘Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town,’ they say. ‘Depart immediately to open country.

The tide climbs. The moon hangs small and yellow and gibbous. On the rooftops of beachfront hotels to the east, and in the gardens behind them, a half-dozen American artillery units drop incendiary rounds into the mouths of mortars.

– All the Light We Cannot See

If you’re looking for a good read this month pick up any of Doerr’s works

Doerr’s latest novel is “Cloud Cuckoo Land” and the jacket copy describing its plot sounds to me like a painfully dull read. It’s complex, following a handful of characters separated by thousands of miles and hundreds (maybe thousands) of years. But, I knew Doerr’s writing was masterful, so I picked it up.

Once again, Doerr does not disappoint. He thrills. His words slide effortlessly into my brain, erupt into vivid images that compel and delight. They demand more. Despite its complexity, the parallel stories glide through my mind, page after page, minutes becoming hours until reality intrudes and I begrudgingly must force myself to put the book down, leaving Doerr’s characters and worlds behind.

Two hundred miles northwest of Constantinople, in a little wood-cutters’ village beside a quick, violent river, a boy is born almost whole. He has wet eyes, pink cheeks, and plenty of spring in his legs. But on the left side of his mouth, a split divides his upper lip from his gum all the way to the base of his nose.

The midwife backs away.

– Cloud Cuckoo Land

It’s rare for me to love a book just because of the flavour of its prose. Doerr’s works are like that. I’ve just begun his first novel “About Grace” and it’s a similar story, even though I actively dislike the main character. So far. It’s clear in his first effort that Doerr hadn’t yet fully developed his masterful prose. Still, his descriptive narratives are rich and multi-dimensional. You can see the brilliance just waiting to emerge.

So, if you’re looking for something to read over the holidays, pick up one of Doerr’s novels. Start with his Pulitzer-winning “All the Light We Cannot See,” or his latest which is still on bestseller shelves at local bookstores: “Cloud Cuckoo Land.” If you love reading, you’ll love Doerr.

I was surprised to see Indigo pricing is now very competitive

On a side note, I’ve found that Indigo books have become quite competitive when it comes to pricing on books. They’re in-store prices used to be much higher than their online prices, and both used to be vastly higher than Amazon. Not anymore. In every case recently, I’ve found that both in-store and online Indigo prices have matched Amazon. So, if you’re looking to support a real, honest to goodness bookstore, buy it at your local. If you’ve got an independent bookstore near you and you can afford their often slightly higher prices, do that instead!

What are you looking forward to read over the holidays? Will you buy it or borrow it? From where?