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I preordered this book months ago and was so excited to read it!

An absolutely gorgeous book about love and beauty, grief and healing. All the Beauty in the World is about a man who is grief-stricken after the loss of his older brother to cancer at twenty-seven.
Toward the end, sitting at his brother’s bedside in the hospital with his mother, they are utterly devastated into silence. A shaft of life streams in through a curtain and his mother says something like, “Look at us, we have become a fucking old masters painting.��

Like a pieta.

Unable to go back to life as usual, he quits his “promising job�� at the New Yorker and becomes a guard at the Metropolitan Museum.
In the museum, every day he stares at beautiful works of art and slowly, slowly, he finds himself coming back to life. He heals, as his mind is re-ordered by the beautiful works of art he stands before every day for eight and twelve-hour shifts.

A year turns into ten.

Loved the concept, loved the beautiful emotional writing and thought he was especially brilliant at looking at particular works of art.

Just like a person laughs when something is funny, he says, we also react physically to beauty.
The trick is to slow down enough to notice—not just notice beauty itself but also one’s response to it.

Cannot recommend this one enough. It was my favorite nonfiction of the year--so far!