just finished: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell is a brilliant new author. This is his third book and already it’s a fresh new read - style-wise and plot-wise. It consists of six different, yet interrelated, story lines and set of characters. In each sequential story, the character is reading (or watching) the story that you have just read, yet is cut off in the middle of finishing it, and once Mitchell gets to the sixth and final story, he progresses backwards through the stories again until he ends on the one the reader started with. Although it’s a pretty difficult read and takes a bit of time to get through, it is well worth it in the end. Mitchell keeps it interesting by flawlessly changing his writing style drastically with each new story. It takes you everywhere from 19th-century Pacific Ocean, to early 21st century England, to dystopian near-future Korea, to post-apocolyptic Hawaii. And if you need any more reason to see it, you may want to jump on the bandwagon before it becomes a movie later in 2012 - starring Jim Sturgess and Ben Winshaw (perfect!) as Robert Frobisher, and not to mention Hugo Weaving to satisfy all your (my) LOTR needs.
