Cloud Atlas

I recently read Cloud Atlas, the novel by David Mitchell.  I found it an incredible read.  The story starts off in the 19th century, with a trader travelling in the pacific.  He sails for home and is befriended by a doctor on board ship.  Our hero falls sick and gets more ill as time goes along, when suddenly... It's the early 20th century and we're with a con-man/musician, on the run from dodgy characters and trying to make some money from an ailing composer.

And thus the story continues, every time we reach a crisis point in the story, it jumps forward in time to a new, seemingly unrelated story, until we're in the far, distant future, in a world unrecognisable from our own.  And when that story completes, Mitchell brings us back through each world, completing each story in turn until we are back where we started.

It' a brilliant device, and you will have great fun spotting the connections between each story.  And wondering which of the chapters is "real" or "fiction" in the context of the stories which come after.

Probably one of the best novels I've ever read.

One Day

I've just finished reading One Day by David Nicholls and thought I'd recommend it to you.

Emma and Dexter meet on 15th July 1988.  For the next twenty-odd years we see snapshots of their friendship, and key scenes in their relationships with others, on the anniversary of that meeting. So each episode takes place on subsequent 15th Julys.

If you were born in the mid 1960s, or you ever had a friend who you hoped would become a lover, then you'll love this book.  If this doesn't apply to you, you'll still like it.  It's funny, moving, perceptive and deep while still being easy to read.

The best book I've read for a long, long time.

Books Books Books

Here's a meme which I saw over at the rather fabulous Cocktail Party Physics (great reading if you love science but hate wading through equations - Jen's a great writer).

Anyway, the rules are, from the list of books below:

1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you have started but haven't finished.
3) Place an asterisk by those you intend to read/finish someday.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee *
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens *
11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare *
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger [hated it, couldn't finish]
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald *
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [odd bit of duplication re: #33]
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres [Slogged my way through this]
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown [oh, the shame of it!]
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving *
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins *
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood *
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan *
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel [DULL!]
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth *
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon [Never heard of it]
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov *
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac *
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie *
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville *
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce *
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad *
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Ooh, only 33%. But I've read LOADS of books. Mind you, there's no Stephen King up there. Only one Iain Banks. No Murakami. No Zadie Smith; Carl Hiaasen; Lee Childs; Grahame Greene; Anthony Burgess; DH Lawrence; Agatha Christie; Michael Connelly; Robert Crais; Harlan Coben; Dennis Lehane. No Spike Milligan. No PG Wodehouse. No Nick Hornby. No Roddy Doyle. No Raymond Chandler or Dashiel Hammett.

I would go on. But I'm running out of virtual ink...