And There Was Light

Author: Jaques Lusseyran

Pages: 282

Rating: PG (there is no language and he doesn't even ever get super descriptive about violence either. However, this is definitely an adult book because the writing is too...dense? for a younger audience. It's very deep and intense)

Summary:
When Jacques Lusseyran was an eight-year-old Parisian schoolboy, he was blinded in an accident. He finished his schooling determined to participate in the world around him. In 1941, when he was seventeen, that world was Nazi-occupied France. Lusseyran formed a resistance group with fifty-two boys and used his heightened senses to recruit the best. Eventually, Lusseyran was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in a transport of two thousand resistance fighters. He was one of only thirty from the transport to survive. His gripping story is one of the most powerful and insightful descriptions of living and thriving with blindness, or indeed any challenge, ever published.

My Thoughts: I found this book...a little tough to get through. There is very little dialogue, and some of the philosophical ideas the author expounds upon went a bit over my head. The story was very interesting, that's for sure, but I felt like he spent way too much time on his childhood and very few pages on his work with the Resistance and subsequent imprisonment. I did enjoy the many reflections on how although he could not see with his eyes, he could still see in many other ways, and most of the time he did not consider himself handicapped at all. I think his general attitude about life is incredibly admirable and worth emulating. He also was one who survived the concentration camps by focusing on helping others instead of on his own difficulties. He fully believed in God the entire time, and realized the importance of just letting each moment of life be what it is and just accepting it.

I think in order to get the full effect of this book you have to pause a lot to reflect on what has just been said. It's not a book you can just read through quickly (like I did). It was definitely a different perspective than I have read before though and was very good!

The Bookshop on the Corner

Author: Jenny Colgan

Pages: 332

Rating: PG-13 (there is sex at the end but it is not graphically described. I think 3 instances of the F-word, and one or two other swear words, but they are rare.)

Summary:
Nina is a literary matchmaker. Pairing a reader with that perfect book is her passion… and also her job. Or at least it was. Until yesterday, she was a librarian in the hectic city. But now the job she loved is no more.

Determined to make a new life for herself, Nina moves to a sleepy village many miles away. There she buys a van and transforms it into a bookmobile — a mobile bookshop that she drives from neighborhood to neighborhood, changing one life after another with the power of storytelling. 
From helping her grumpy landlord deliver a lamb, to sharing picnics with a charming train conductor who serenades her with poetry, Nina discovers there’s plenty of adventure, magic, and soul in a place that’s beginning to feel like home… a place where she just might be able to write her own happy ending.

My Thoughts: I highly enjoyed this book! Nina is a girl after my own soul. She loves to read, and basically has lived her life buried in books, until the library she works at closes, and she no longer has a job. So she follows what some feel is a ridiculous dream, and she moves up to Scotland with a big van full of books to sell. (She lived in England before). I have always wanted to visit Scotland, and the descriptions of the landscape, the people, and the view made me want it even more! There is quite a commentary going on about how living in a city we get too caught up in our own lives, in the screens in front of our faces, and fitting in. Out in the country, things are different. It makes one long for a visit!

At the bottom of it all, this book is really a romance, because as Nina learns more about herself and comes out of her shell, she does find love, but I won't give anything else away.

The one thing I don't like much about this book is the title. "The Bookshop on the Corner" makes me think of a little shop tucked away on a quiet corner of a busy street. But really she has a van and she calls it "The Little Shop of Happy Ever After" so...I'm not sure why that isn't the title of the book.

Also, so many other books are referenced in this one that it made me want to look all of them up! Although I did look up the most frequently referenced book, "Up on the Rooftops" and I don't think that's actually a real book. I think it was fabricated for the purpose of the story.

Anyway, it was a good read. Not too deep, but not boring, and how can you go wrong with a book about someone who loves books?