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Cloud Cuckoo Land

Anthony Doerr

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Feb 26, 2023 Pallavi Mohan rated it liked it

Anthony Doerr sent me on a literary whirlwind in 2016 after I read his previous book, All The Light We Cannot See. Hungry for more of Doerr's words, I went on a feverish search for books that turned my soul inside out as much as this one had, only to meet with a spate of mediocrity. For a long while, very little could match it (that it also fueled in me an intense urge to fly to Saint-Malo and Mont-Saint-Michel afterwards was further testament to Doerr's evocative prose).

And then Cloud Cuckoo La Anthony Doerr sent me on a literary whirlwind in 2016 after I read his previous book, All The Light We Cannot See. Hungry for more of Doerr's words, I went on a feverish search for books that turned my soul inside out as much as this one had, only to meet with a spate of mediocrity. For a long while, very little could match it (that it also fueled in me an intense urge to fly to Saint-Malo and Mont-Saint-Michel afterwards was further testament to Doerr's evocative prose).

And then Cloud Cuckoo Land made its way into my bookshelf, a 600-page goldmine, 7 years later. The premise is riveting and the timing, perfect - it came to me after some excellent sci-fi reads. In CCL I had high, high hopes.

In all honesty, this is a fine book. One of a certain degree of literary prowess, perhaps even more astute than All The Light We Cannot See. It centers around an ancient Greek codex that is read, in excruciatingly slow bits and pieces, by people that span centuries - from fifteenth-century Byzantine empire to an intergenerational starship in an unspecified future. It is hard to slot this into a niche - not quite historical, not quite science fiction, not quite ecological fiction. What it tries to be, though, is everything. Perhaps that is where it falters the most.

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Does my three star rating bear the weight of expectations from its predecessor? I don't know. But for me, it was one of those books that, just when it teetered briefly on the brim of true greatness someplace midway, caught itself, floundered a little bit and toppled back into lukewarm waters by the end. ...more

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Jan 10, 2023 Heather rated it liked it

Shelves: work-book-club-read

Interesting stories but a bit of a slog. Too many ideas crammed into one book.

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Dec 12, 2024 Murilo Queiroz rated it it was amazing

Dec 23, 2022 Akshaya marked it as to-read

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