What do you think of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas?

There's no way the Wachowskis will not fuck this up. Between this and Baz Luhrman doing Gatsby, and Keira Knightley doing Anna Karenina, there are going to be some incredibly vulgarised movies of great books soon.

Bad books too: Life of Pi

Cloud Atlas is good but it's not in Gatsby/Anna Karenina territory! The thing about Cloud Atlas is that it would actually make brilliant schlocky Hollywood cinema but I don't really trust the Wachowskis not to blow it.

fantastic (long) interview: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6034/the-art-of-fiction-no-204-david-mitchell

I liked the story about the businessman in Hong Kong and the mythical story best. I liked the dystopian stories least. (Dystopia seems hard to imagine or temporary, fleeting, and situated.)

"dammit weed" lol

so psyched.

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/new-david-mitchell-novel-out-next-autumn.html

I was a bit this way and that on de Zoet but this is goi to be grebt:

The Bone Clocks.

while i loved this book and plan on reading everything else of his i was in exactly the same position as nabisco

My weird nagging issues on this are totally mechanical, though -- he does so much to toy with the idea that there's a mechanical in-the-book connection between all these characters, but he doesn't have one! For some reason this bugged all hell out of me: why keep hinting that you've got a concrete, non-thematic explanation for the form when you really, really don't? The many airy allusions to reincarnation are blown apart by (among other things) Luisa Ray: Cavendish would have been born around the point Frobisher died, so why is there a character from a thriller shoehorned between them? This wouldn't normally be a problem, but there's something about the form that leads you to believe the second halves of the story will give you a change to figure something out about the connections -- not something thematic, but something physical -- and yet with a lot of those second halves he seems to be writing purely for plot, just enjoying wrapping up the tales themselves, as if most of his content was on the page by the middle section, and everything thereafter is just tidying up.

So beyond the center section, I was mostly just chopping through to get the thing done, pushing through a lot of pages looking for some connections that didn't seem likely to crop up.

before the second half i was CONVINCED there was some epic connection that was going to string them all together. my best guess was some kind of rift in time thing where adam ewing somehow travels through time to the post apocalyptic future. zachry refers to "pa n' adam" being captured by kona, so i thought maybe autua was zachry's father, and he and adam had traveled through time due to something that would conspire once they'd reached hawaii. would've worked out perfectly, too, since frobisher hadn't found the second half of adam's diary yet, and luisa hadn't read the second half of frobisher's correspondence yet. then some connection with the nuclear reactor, her father maybe? i hadn't worked out the details past that point. anyways, IMO kind of a missed opportunity and i do agree with nabs that it hinted too much at a connection that wasn't there. but oh well, still an amazing read. is the new one good?

also if luisa is fictional then so are zedelghem and pacific diaries, no? i got the impression it was true crime but as n points out that blows apart the reincarnation thing, although i think mitchell might have just legit fucked up in that regard, as there's an ironic in-joke where timothy cavendish says that he would edit out the suggestion that frobisher and luisa are the same person, at which pt the reader is supposed to knowingly lol like, dude you are that person too!