My book club (which I readily admit I’m rarely able to attend) read All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr a few months back.  Without giving too much away, I’d give it a 4 out of 5.

I found his writing excellent.  And, the story was captivating for the first three quarters.  Then I felt like it went downhill.  Some others had issues with how the characters’ stories ended.  That was not my problem.  I took issue with the need he seemed to have to touch on everything that happened towards the end of WWII even if it took stretching the story to reach it.  I know this from other sources so it was truly unnecessary and did not add to the book.

In summary, I would read another of his books, but if it resulted in a similar ending I’d probably stop.  That’s unfortunately as this book was enjoyable for so long and then just dragged to the finish.

Make the Bread, But the Butter by Jennifer Reese

I’m neither a super frugal person nor one who is committed to making everything from scratch.  But, I like cookbooks, I like numerical analysis, and I already make some breads from scratch so I thought I’d give this book a try.

Overall it was good.  We tried the roast chicken recipe and it was excellent.  However, the Everyday Bread was not.  It was fine, but certainly not a consistency I would use for anything every day.

I did find the analyses with the pros/cons of making vs buying each thing fascinating. Admittedly, most of the time I basically bought her analysis.  But, every now and then something would come up that I buy often enough to be very familiar with the price and I found her buy prices to be a bit high.  I’m not sure if that’s her part of the country or whether I buy store brand on sale or what, but it made me think that the close ones weren’t worth making necessarily.

All in all, I’m glad I read it.  It’s a pretty fast read, interesting, and well written.