Strange World and Cloud Cuckoo Land
Dec. 12th, 2022 10:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearWe went to the cinema last week to see Strange World - and I really enjoyed it! It's got great diversity, engaging characters, amazing visuals, brilliant family dynamics, a cute dog and an entertaining blob creature - what's not to like?
I also finished reading Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr - which is epic in scale, structure, emotion and cleverness. It's a fractured narrative - a boy in the besieging force against Constantinople in 1452 and a girl stuck behind the walls, an old man helping some kids rehearse a play in a library in Idaho in 202 and the young man trying to plant a bomb there, and a teenage girl who is potentially the last surviving human on an arc ship in around 2100. I loved the fact that the paired storylines focused on characters on both sides of each conflict, and made me care deeply about all of them.
I loved the fact that they were all (at first tenuously) linked by a fictional 2nd century Greek story about a shepherd trying to reach the mythical city from Aristophanes' The Birds. It was brutal in places and desperately sad in others, and I was worried that I couldn't be satisfied with any possible ending. But then it all came together in quite an astonishing way, which left me amazed by the intricacy and brilliance of it. A great read.
I also finished reading Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr - which is epic in scale, structure, emotion and cleverness. It's a fractured narrative - a boy in the besieging force against Constantinople in 1452 and a girl stuck behind the walls, an old man helping some kids rehearse a play in a library in Idaho in 202 and the young man trying to plant a bomb there, and a teenage girl who is potentially the last surviving human on an arc ship in around 2100. I loved the fact that the paired storylines focused on characters on both sides of each conflict, and made me care deeply about all of them.
I loved the fact that they were all (at first tenuously) linked by a fictional 2nd century Greek story about a shepherd trying to reach the mythical city from Aristophanes' The Birds. It was brutal in places and desperately sad in others, and I was worried that I couldn't be satisfied with any possible ending. But then it all came together in quite an astonishing way, which left me amazed by the intricacy and brilliance of it. A great read.
