Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

All the Light We Cannot See was one of the best books I had ever read. I definitely intended to read Cloud Cuckoo Land as soon as I heard about it. And then Austin gave it to me for Christmas, and I really really wanted to read it. But it was so big! And I got pregnant and was so sick! And all I wanted to read the last six months was quick and easy short books, nothing that involved any actual thought or effort. But I feel like I kind of came out of that after our trip, and I finally jumped into this book--and it did take me a few days to get fully into it, but once I did, I couldn't put it down. I read the last 400+ pages in two nights because I couldn't wait to see where the story was going. I feel like it's rare that I am surprised by the way a story is organized these days--I've read a lot of books and it seems like there are patterns. But when I heard this one described, with three different storylines, set nearly 1000 years apart, I couldn't imagine how it would go. I love the idea behind it--three different time periods (1400s, present day, 200 years in the future) and five different characters, all tied together by the same story and how they interacted with it. The main idea of the book seems to be about the power of a story and how it can change and influence people, and about the importance of preserving stories and not letting stories and books disappear. 

I feel like sometimes with these books that have multiple storylines, there are one or two of them that I am not interested in or that I feel like I am just suffering through to get back to the ones that I like better. But in this book, I actually genuinely enjoyed all of the storylines. There was one character who I liked the least, but since there were five storylines, I felt like I was really excited about what was happening and finding out about each of the characters. I really was invested in Anna and Omeir, the two young kids on opposing sides of the war in Constantinople in 1452, and in Konstance, the teenager stuck on a spaceship hurtling through space, and in Zeno, the old man in 2020 who was translating the Greek story that was the thread that connected all of these disparate characters. 

Basically, this book was fantastic. It kept me thinking, it kept me engaged, and it was really well written and beautiful.