Cloud Cuckoo Land. Doerr. An imaginative story of five people spanning from the fall of Constantinople in the 1400s to the Korean War in the 1950s to present day Idaho to a generation starship in the 22nd century, all connected by a fictional lost Greek fantasy epic from the 2nd century. The novel opens with gusto as the short chapters bounce between these very different settings and it’s not clear at all how some of them will come together. Somewhere in the late middle that mystery is lost, even before being actually resolved, but the novel has shifted to an appealingly sweet paean to books and storytelling. Normally I’m viscerally opposed to self-congratulating media but it’s well done here, possibly because the stakes remain largely individual. Doerr stretches his oeuvre a bit in this work to science fiction and it shows: All the historical sections are very good but the lite sci-fi near future and far future segments are comparatively tepid and implausible, although they don’t bring the book down. The other storylines are infused with such good characters and the soft joy of story that it’s a great book.