Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

Complicated novel. The book jacket described it as "the novel as a series of nesting dolls", and that was pretty accurate. There were multiple, tenuously connected stories spanning centuries. If you took each story and assigned it a value, the pattern looked something like: A,B,C,D,E,F,E,D,C,B,A. So you started with a story, switched to something else, switched to something else again, and then eventually worked your way back to complete them. It was the connections between the stories that irked me the most - I found they contradicted other parts of the book.

This was my first book club read - I saw a newspaper ad and joined the book club at the public library. There were only 2 other people at the meeting, and one was the librarian. Not the most auspicious welcome. Apparently, the other members don't bother to come if they didn't like the book.

This also prompted interesting debate between me and the hubby: if a book contains sci-fi elements, does it automatically become a sci-fi book? I argued no, but hubby was unconvinced. A question to ponder for the ages...

March 2007.