Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

 I read somewhere that Doerr kept a chart of the characters and events of this book so he wouldn't lose track of the story. In the beginning there seems to be too many threads to possibly make sense of it all.  Really it turns out to be three stories with multiple narrators and lots of time leaps all connected by a single book.  The earliest story is the tale of Anna and Omier.  Both young and poor, their paths cross during the  battles of Constantinople in the 1400's. They find the book.  The "contemporary" story follows the life of Zeno who, at the age of 80, is helping a group of young children in a library in Idaho perform a story from the book- and Seymour, a troubled teen whose attempt to blow up the library is thwarted by their practice. The third story is told by the young girl, Konstance, locked in a room alone aboard an interstellar space ship in the not-so-distant future.  Frantically, she copies, from memory, bits of the book her father read to her.  The technology aboard the spaceship keeps her alive and oddly connected to life on Earth but to what end? 

All of this, Doerr says, is to honor books and the libraries and librarians who guarantee our right to read them, to freely "know".  As Licinius, the old man who taught Anna to read says, "But books like people, die.  They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whim of tyrants.  If they are not safe-guarded, they go out of the world.  And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death."  This 600+ page journey is at the very least memory making.