Whatshot
Cloud Cuckoo Land
Cloud Cuckoo Land
Date: 2024-12-24
"Into my mind leapt a vision of a palace of golden towers stacked on clouds, ringed by falcons, redshanks, quails...where tortoises circulated with honeycakes balanced on their backs...'
I have always been a believer in cloud cuckoo lands, my parents always finding me deep in books, imagining, floating through different times and place, building palaces and discovering hidden worlds. "Your head is constantly stuck in the clouds", their quizzical refrain. I never really came out of that cumulus phase. As 2024 draws to a close, I reflect on my year of reading. A bounteous one, two books a month, magical worlds opened. I discovered new authors; Karen Jennings, Samantha Harvey, Abraham Verghese. It was a sheer delight. But the writer who stole my mind and then released it into a series of mind-tingling adventures is Anthony Doerr. Once I read 'All the Light we Cannot See', I was hooked, floating through 'About Grace' and 'Seasons in Rome', and the ultimate journey, 'Cloud Cuckoo Land'.
This is a profoundly moving book, the narrative spinning out of an ancient Greek tale by Antonius Diogenes of a quest for the golden land, intertwined with a plot and characters who swing between the siege of Constantinople, Idaho, a modern-day climate activist, and a futuristic spaceship. It is a love letter to books, to 'the Librarians, then, now and in the years to come.' In a world of fear, war, and turmoil, 'where the gods spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come', Cloud Cuckoo Land is a book of connections, of lives where clocks do not stand still, spinning backwards, forwards. War becomes peace, death is life's constant companion and magic is truth.
Books can, and will always be able to sweep us away, into the clouds and onto the backs of tortoises. When you pick up a book, step back, be, gaze forward and remind yourself of Antonius Diogenes, who wrote of his fabulous tale, "Stranger, whoever you are, open this to find what will amaze you."

