I am becoming less and less of a shopper. Probably because I am in a serious decluttering mode. And shopping eventually leads to more decluttering. But I could not resist this Souvenir de Paris deskset. The little box in the front is an inkwell. This treasure was accompanied by this sweet note from Jill. You can visit her tempting etsy store at JBBPensPaper.

My new font, Dear Rae, is coming along rather nicely. By the end of the week I hope to have all the letters drawn and in the font program. Now I have about 350 characters. The above pen is what I am using for this font. And ink, of course.

I just discovered vintage postage at Jim's Coins at Hilldale here in Madison! I spent some time going though pages and pages of stamps and bringing many of them home. Since I write to people weekly this adds a little something special to my notes. And while I did buy enough that they gave me a discount it is just postage and will get used up.

This book is every bit as good as everyone says. It is 500 pages and I both cannot put it down and know I will hate it when I've finished it.

Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks. When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris in June of 1940, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure’s agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall.

In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure’s.

Doerr’s gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of multiple characters, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. - anthonydoerr.com

Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction; a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award and the 2015 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; winner of the Australian International Book Award; a #1 New York Times bestseller; the 2014 Book of the Year at Hudson Booksellers; the #2 book of 2014 at Amazon.com; a LibraryReads Favorite of Favorites; named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review; a best book of 2014 at Powell’s Books, Barnes & Noble, NPR’s Fresh Air, San Francisco Chronicle, The Week, Entertainment Weekly, the Daily Beast, Slate.com, Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, the Seattle Times, the Oregonian, the Guardian, and Kirkus; and a #1 Indie Next pick, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work.