On the New York Times bestseller list for 19 weeks * A New York Times Notable Book * A Barack Obama Favorite * A National Book Award Finalist * Named a Best of the Year by Fresh Air, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Associated Press, and many more ...

No one disliked Cloud Cuckoo Land, but NUBClub's rating ranged from okay to pretty good with no exceptional marks in the room. No one could deny that when Doerr hit, he had some very good writing and very engaging stories. Of the five characters he follows, Zeno was the standout favorite; everyone loved the arc of his love affair with Richard, his experiences through the war, and his eventually decisions to translate and fill in the myth his own way. Various members of us found one other of the five characters Doerr follows interesting. Some of us like Konstance and everything thought the twist in the future story about the arcship was interesting. Some of us liked the view into Constantinople's history well drawn and compelling. But the main issue is that there were five of these characters and no one felt let they all deserved the time they were given. No one liked the Stanley story -- the journey Stanley making into environmental terrorism is obvious and takes too long to develop, the decisions he and his mother make just don't make any sense (if the mom has been navigating poverty for so long, would she really suddenly take out such stupid loans?) and perhaps most importantly, don't we already get most of the critical components of that time period from Zeno's perspective? It just seemed like a lot was going on in the novel to justify the presence of the fragments of the Greek myth and how the information got passed into the future and none of us needed any of that to believe the story. Kim argued that part of the point was the arbitrariness of how this one dopey story got saved when others didn't, but we really didn't think we needed that point belabored by so much additional content and it felt like a lot of the other stories were just padded to make them entertaining while the fragments got passed along. Seriously, why did we need to hear about Omeir's oxen? Why is Omeir and Anna's love story necessary? All of us thought at least 2/5ths of the novel could have been cut without consequence. On top of that, while the theme of the random survival of the myth was important to the idea that worlds end and things change in random ways, basing your story around a mediocre myth is giving your novel a pretty weak core. It's a lot to ask us to believe that something was both kind of stupid and yet so compelling to these five people that their stories would center around it. Ultimately, we didn't hate Cloud Cuckoo Land, but we just felt it was hampered by a badly designed structure and would have been much better if the author had trimmed the story down to the one or two stories that mattered; those fragments would have communicated the message better than the whole.