Book Discussion Group Meeting, Saturday, September 9, 2017, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

First Things First: If you have not already done so, scroll down to the post immediately below this one and pick the six books that you would most like to read in the first half of 2018. Please send your selections to Peggy (psunlane@yahoo.com) as soon as possible so she can have our choices to Lori before September 22.

British family listening to the BBC during wartime (note gas masks).

Anthony Doerr was born in 1973 in Cleveland, Ohio, where he spent his childhood. He received a degree in history from Bowdoin College and then an MFA from Bowling Green State University. He is the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. He has won numerous prizes both in the US and overseas, including four O. Henry Prizes, three Pushcart Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. All the Light We Cannot See won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for 2015.

The video below contains an interview with Anthony Doerr at the Oregon Humanities Center at the University of Oregon, which was recorded the week before All the Light We Cannot See was released. He talks about his inspiration for the book and what he was hoping to convey.



Snapshots for Marie-Laure 

The National Natural History Museum in Paris with the Jardin des Plantes in the foreground.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne

St. Malo from the sea side.

The Whelk

Snapshots for Werner

Zollverein Coal Mine in Essen, Germany, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site

Schulpforta: The fictional Werner studied here, and so did the real Friedrich Nietzsche

German Radioman

Everything you ever wanted to know about radio triangulation: