Thank you, All the Light We Cannot See, for teaching me to have more confidence in my gut. Here's the thing. My mom read this book a month or two ago, and I absolutely could not get over its title—light we can’t see? Seriously?! I’d never heard of a more cliché, pretentious, falsely powerful name for a novel. I teased her constantly about it, and before long it became a household joke. If I announced, amid mountains of papers on the dining room table, that I was ten minutes away from finishing my homework; if my dad unraveled a new yarn about his slave labor during childhood; if my sister, after spending all of fifteen seconds in the bathroom, insisted she’d washed her hands; if my mom assured us we had tried that strange vegetable before and loved it…whoever was in the room at the time would smile, shake his or her head, and mutter, “All that light, man. I’m just not seein’ it.”

So, long story short (or perhaps short story long), this book was not high on my to-read list. I admit that was chiefly because I couldn’t bear the thought of being proven wrong. But then I caught the first glimpse of its success. While buying a last-minute Christmas gift online, an ad off to the side caught my eye: All the Light We Cannot See, Amazon’s #2 Book of 2014! Get Yours Today! I know all the folks on Amazon aren’t the type to drool over a mushy, popular love story. Something stirred in the back of my mind. After that, it seemed like praise for Anthony Doerr’s novel was everywhere. Suddenly I learned it had been first on the New York Times Bestseller List, was a finalist for the National Book Award, had claimed 2014 Best Fiction or Historical Fiction in numerous places. And being me, I couldn't resist the prospect of a great book. Within a few weeks, it was downloaded onto a library Kindle (due to the fact that it had 279 holds in print) and in my hands. And let me tell you, even though everything worked out well enough in the end, I owe a big apology to my instincts.

I can't deny that this book was beautiful. Author Anthony Doerr is no doubt a master craftsman of words, weaving them together to form the most delicate and simply breathtaking sentences. On nearly every page several would jump out at me: “Her fingers walk the tightropes of sentences”, “connecting his fingers to the engine of his mind”, “a real diamond is never perfect”. I took full advantage of the highlight feature on the kindle and often added highly insightful comments (namely “WOW” and “WHOA”) so I could remember my reactions. There were enough…well, enough beautiful lines to write at least ten papers on this novel.

But. There's always a but. I confess that Doerr succeeded in making me emotional and making me think. It was those very qualities, however, that ended up being his novel's downfall. You see, there were so many poignant, poignant moments—and I mean moments when you have no choice but to pause and catch your breath—that when I came across an empty sentence, I almost felt…I don’t know. Cheated? Betrayed? Those meaningless lines seemed like personal attacks, like Doerr’s way of telling me to stop getting ahead of myself and buckle down to reality.

It didn’t help that a certain phrase from The Fault in Our Stars kept chanting itself in my head: "That’s the thing about pain. It demands to be felt." It’s one of the “iconic” quotes that, when Googled, will suddenly appear in thousands of “inspirational” fonts on thousands of “inspirational” backgrounds. There’s even a whole section for tattoos of it—I offer my sincere condolences to those people, by the way. What angers me is that the quote has absolutely. no. meaning. None. Zilch. Zero. Nada. Goose egg. Pain demands to be felt? Okay, chocolate demands to be eaten. Origami demands to be folded. Movies demand to be watched. So what?! There’s no deeper message, no Eureka moment when your life has a purpose. We all had that moment at five years old when we touched the stove while Mommy was making tea and learned that wow, hot things hurt. And if you do it again, it still hurts. What a concept!

Unfortunately, I had the same opinion about Doerr’s "Don’t you want to be alive before you die?" Yes, you could interpret it as the whole you-only-get-one-shot-so-you-better-get-it-right spiel, but honestly that’s just as worthless. Even in its context, amidst the terrors and pressures of World War II, it seemed like rubbish—perhaps even more so because of that time period. Everything happening was so powerful, so moving, so influential, that there was absolutely no place for redundancy or frivolous truisms.  No matter how you look at it, it will still be the equivalent of someone walking up to you while you’re licking a lollipop and asking, “Don’t you want to embrace your sweet tooth before you get dentures?” Um, I am, thank you. It made me inexpressibly disappointed to see such words come out of Doerr’s pen and occupy space on the page; I couldn’t help but wonder what other marvels could have taken their place.