Tag Archives: Libraries

Cloud Cuckoo Land

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These days we might all want to escape reality and live in a cloud cuckoo land. The phrase has been used in politics, poetry, and music, but Anthony Doerr cleverly channels its ancient Greek mythological origin to tie together a story spanning from Constantinople, to the Korean War, to present day, and finally, to a spaceship of the future where a few select citizens of Earth have escaped the apocalypse and are traveling to a better place, light years away.

The kernel of the story keeps reappearing as a favorite book of five intersecting characters across centuries. The book first appears as a crumbling codex in the legendary library of ancient Constantinople just before the city was captured and destroyed. Anna reads the story of Aethon to her sister. Once told by an ancient Greek as a bedtime tale and based on Aristophanes’ play, “The Birds,” a man wishing for a better life dreams of becoming a soaring bird, in order to reach the fabled paradise of cloud cuckoo land. He first turns into a donkey, then a fish, until finally getting his wings to land at the gates of his destination.

Before the city falls, Anna escapes with the book and meets Omeir, a village boy with his oxen who had been conscripted into the war to destroy Constantinople but is now heading home.

When the book started, I got lost and had to start again. The stories seemed unconnected as they jumped centuries, but the rhythm soon caught up with me, until it became a page-turner I couldn’t put down. The ingenious hook occurs early in a scene at a library, where children are enacting the mythical story about the donkey searching for redemption. Zeno, who learned Greek as a prisoner of war and is now an ardent library regular researching the old Greek tale, is directing children in a play about the search for cloud cuckoo land. Doerr later backtracks to fill in Zeno’s life as a young man, but here, at the beginning of the story, he is an old man in his eighties, about to confront a teenage terrorist with a gun and a bomb, intent on using the violent suggestions he learned from the internet to save the world from the encroaching development destroying the environment around him.

We learn Zeno’s fate through the young girl in the spaceship of the future. Konstance was born on the spaceship and only knows about Earth from her research, facilitated by Sybil, the computer driving the ship and in charge of the ship’s library. Seymour, the troubled teenager with the bomb in the library of 2020, developed the software for Sybil, and secretly placed a series of hidden clues in the code which leads the girl to her destination.

Despite knowing what will happen to Zeno, the intermittent returning to the library with children cowering in the stacks remains the tease – maybe it will turn out better, we hope, knowing it won’t. And, knowing the girl is on the spaceship in the future, looking for another planet, proves the Earth has already self-destructed, yet this doesn’t keep us from hoping otherwise – we are all in cloud cuckoo land, after all.

Like so many wise epithets included in Doerr’s story, the donkey turned bird is faced with a riddle to solve before being allowed entrance to the gates of paradise: “He that knows all the Learning ever writ, knows only this.” What is the only thing he knows? You might guess the answer – the more you know, the more you know you know nothing. And libraries are the places where you can find out.

Doerr connects all the lives in the ending, the book is returned to the library, and he neatly wraps up the donkey’s quest. Faced with the choice of staying in the paradise of cloud cuckoo land, since he has solved the riddle, he chooses instead to “eat the rose professed by the goddess and returns home.” The myth’s ending has two possibilities in the original Greek version but I prefer the one Doerr chose – no matter where you go, there’s no place like home.

Doerr is a master storyteller and in Cloud Cuckoo Land he reminds readers what a respite reading can offer. He manages to weave the stories of five very different characters together through the love of reading a good book.

Lost in the Stacks

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Mahesh Rao commentary on libraries in his New York Times essay “Lost in the Stacks,” reminded me of how libraries have nurtured my own love of reading.  My first memory of going to a library is linked to  holding my mother’s hand as we walked through the park to a tall building – an adventure to a new world.  Later in college I found comfort in hiding behind books in a remote carrell as I studied obscure passages.  Just like Rao, I inadvertently forgot to return a book or two, discovered years later in my own collection.

Librarians, more than authors, have always held my reverence.  Some are modestly taciturn, never revealing their wealth of information until asked.  Others, like Rao’s North London friend, are ready to share common interests and review my selections as I check out more books than I can carry.

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Trinity College Library, Dublin

Books about libraries draw me in.  Some of my favorites:

  • Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon with the Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a library for literary works no longer remembered by anyone. Daniel  finds mystery and adventure, as books salve the lingering pain of his mother’s death.
  • The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai connects a children’s librarian with questionable ties to the Russian mafia to a curious 10-year-old boy whose parents enroll him in an anti-gay class and strictly monitor his library material.
  • This Book is Overdue by Marilyn Johnson challenges the stereotype of librarians.  See my review – here
  • By Its Cover by Donna Leon uses a rare books collection in a prestigious Venice library as the setting for the twenty-third in her series of Guida Brunetti mysteries. My review – here.

 

 

Do you have a favorite book about libraries?

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By Its Cover by Donna Leon

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9780802122643_p0_v3_s260x420While reading Donna Leon’s latest mystery – By Its Cover – I remembered the first time I had heard of a book thief targeting rare books for their maps and illustrations.    When I lived in Maryland,   Gilbert Bland was caught stealing maps from rare books  in the George Peabody Library in Baltimore, Maryland.  In her publication “Preventing Library Theft,” Audrey Pearson noted:

“…Bland had used a fake identification card to use the library, and had been committing various premeditated thefts, with plans for many more recorded in his notebook. Upon further investigation, Johns Hopkins officials found that Bland had also visited the libraries at {other universities}. Many map dealers around the country had been purchasing the rare maps from Bland for some time, and had acknowledged that they always wondered how he continually had such great inventory… However, Bland had such low prices that most dealers chose not to question his practices… For all of the damage Bland did to libraries, and all of the hundreds of thousands of dollars of theft, Bland was only sentenced to eight to ten months in prison.”

Since that theft in 1995, other maps have been ripped from rare book collections in the United States, and in 2012, thousands of books in Naples’ sixteenth century Girolamini Library were systematically damaged and stolen for sale on the black market.  Donna Leon uses a rare books collection in a prestigious Venice library as the setting for the twenty-third in her series of Guida Brunetti mysteries.   This is my first experience with the expat American author and her hero in crime fighting, Guido Brunetti, Commissario in the Venice police force – how appropriate that the story is about books.

As Brunetti follows leads, including a former priest, an Italian playboy, and a Kansas professor, the murder of one of the prime suspects changes the rhythm of his pursuit.  I am only into the first 100 pages, but am already hooked.

If a mystery could be classified as literary, Leon may have found the formula.  Brunetti is well read and constantly including allusions in his conversation; his appreciation of the beauty of Venice and Leon’s descriptions through his thoughts and observations creates a beautiful backdrop and an appealing counter to the grisly reality of crime and corruption in the city.  At one point, Brunetti reminisces about the time he ran away to work in the fields for a day when he was twelve years old.  Returning home with his pittance wage, his mother asked him if he now realized “how hard a person had to work if all they had to work with was their body.” Lesson learned: “…all you’ll do is work for enough to eat. Even then I knew, I didn’t want to spend my life like that.”

The erudite police commissioner reads English history books at night, has conversations about philosophy with his wife, and stops to smell the Spring flowers on his way to work – all the while using his intellect to solve crimes.  But perhaps his comments on the political realities of the city offer the best insight into his internal struggle – the cruise ships ruining the canals, the corruption of the rich, the influence of the Church…  Brunetti’s character is as fascinating as the mystery he is solving.

 

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New Books Published in April

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Whenever I read a promising review – usually in the New York Times or Washington Post – I immediately log onto my library site to order the book.  Inevitably, the library system does not yet have the book catalogued – or maybe even purchased.  So, I add the book to my list and promptly forget about it.

I have a friend who places his list next to his computer and checks into the library every day until he captures a place – usually the first or second in the queue.  By the time I remember to check, I am usually 50 or 60 on the waiting list;  popular “hot picks” sometimes place me at 273.  Of course, I could always buy the book, but what fun is there in that?

April has 4 new books I want to read.  And the library has yet to list them.  Maybe this will help me remember to keep checking.  If you get there first, please read fast and return the book for me.

            

National Library Week

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Celebrate National Library Week  – visit a library.  USA Today’s travel section includes 10 great places where libraries turn a page from Seattle to Boston.

My favorite library is the Trinity College Library in Dublin – it looks like a movie set, and smells old and musty.

But the library that still impresses me the most is the Library of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.  It’s not just for Congress; I have a Library of Congress library card in my wallet – although it’s been awhile since I’ve been in its hallowed halls, waiting for my slip of paper request to become a book traveling down from the stacks.

These days I am a regular visitor to my community library, usually picking up the books I pre-ordered on line – no more lingering for me.

Books to Read:

  • I Took My Frog to the Library
  • This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cyberians Can Save Us All – check out the Review Here