Da Nang Book Club Meetup

For September we'll read a non-fiction book. A fascinating story about the shipwrecks and other problems caused by the lack of ability to know the longitude. The interesting and bizarre solutions proposed inspired by the large prize money being offered. And the genius of the final solution.

After several older books, for October let’s read something from this decade.
Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr was published in 2021. It’s a long book, over 600 pages, but we have nearly three months to read it. It’s an historical and speculative fiction novel, the story of five characters spanning eight centuries. Their intertwining stories are bound by an Ancient Greek codex entitled Cloud Cuckoo Land that each of the five characters discover and find solace in. It is a fictional book written by real Greek novelist Antonius Diogenes in the second century.
Marcel Theroux wrote in a review in The New York Times that Cloud Cuckoo Land is "a wildly inventive novel that teems with life, straddles an enormous range of experience and learning, and embodies the storytelling gifts that it celebrates."] He said that its characters are "engaging" and the storytelling is "bracing and energetic". Doerr is able to hold together the different narratives, spanning eight centuries, and still produce a "compelling, coherent and moving" book. Theroux concluded that it is "a humane and uplifting book.
Anna is a young orphan in fifteenth‑century Constantinople who teaches herself to read and becomes fascinated with old Greek books she retrieves from a tower . As the Ottoman siege intensifies, her path eventually crosses with Omeir, a rural boy conscripted into the invading army. They flee the city together and eventually get to Omeir’s village.
Zeno grows up in mid‑century Idaho, finding refuge in the local library and later serving in the Korean War, where he befriends a classicist who introduces him to Greek . After returning home, he becomes deeply invested in translating the ancient Cloud Cuckoo Land text and shares his love of stories with local children .
Seymour is a sensitive, nature loving boy in early‑21st‑century Idaho who becomes increasingly distressed by environmental destruction around his home . His anger and isolation draw him toward radical environmental groups who convince him that dramatic action is necessary to make people pay attention.
Konstance is a young girl living aboard a multi-generation starship in the twenty‑second century, raised on her father’s readings of Cloud Cuckoo Land . After a mysterious plague confines her to a vault with only the ship’s AI for company, she begins exploring the ship’s vast virtual library and grows curious about the world her ancestors left behind.