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3.99 AVERAGE
3.99 AVERAGE
adventurous
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
An all-time favorite god I love Robert so much he has my whole heart
adventurous
challenging
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Wonderful book, too vast to summerize quickly, but suffice to say it was impressive and had a well crafted humanitarian core within the interwoven tales. Lovely lovely. Bonus, I am now ready and very excited to see the film.
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I started reading this book in 2011, but gave up a few pages in. I held on to it because I loved the title and had a feeling I'd eventually give it another go. This past year my brother gave me David Mitchell's latest book, The Bone Clocks, and asked if I'd ever read Cloud Atlas. Embarrassed, I had to tell him I tried but had given up. So, guilted into a second try, I picked this up just before a recent vacation and absolutely devoured it. Funny how a few years changed my taste. Each story took a bit of warming up to really capture my attention, but I enjoyed the feeling of falling into each world and discovering the bits linking each person and story together (however hokey and contrived... I'm a sucker for coincidence). And with the final chapter of Adam Ewings' diary, I finally felt a wonderful revelation of the sense of humanity that truly ties each character together. This was an intriguing read full of inventiveness, a wonderful challenge, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone interested in history and science fiction... but I'd also recommend it to anyone, really.
☁️ This was a fantastically clever book, weaving six stories together, all in different time periods, in different places, in different genres and written in different styles. The way that Mitchell wrote differently as each narrator and adapted the way that language has evolved over time was ingenious.
That being said, I did find some of the sections a challenge to read. Mainly the futuristic chapters as the language was just so different! However the 70s thriller story did make up for that and I would have definitely have loved to read an entire book just set in that world with those characters.
I was going to only give it 3 starts due to my struggles with large sections of the book but the world building and nested stories are really clever and that wins it the fourth star! ⛅️
That being said, I did find some of the sections a challenge to read. Mainly the futuristic chapters as the language was just so different! However the 70s thriller story did make up for that and I would have definitely have loved to read an entire book just set in that world with those characters.
I was going to only give it 3 starts due to my struggles with large sections of the book but the world building and nested stories are really clever and that wins it the fourth star! ⛅️
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Each individual story is engrossing, with investment in the protagonist's fate within their plot. It has an impressive structure of course, with all the throughlines between stories you could spend a lot of time uncovering, and fun metafictional aspects, with all the questioning of narrators and reality that that entails... Ultimately seems hundred percent like the type of book I'd be obsessed with, but I don't feel particularly inclined to dwell on it, which informs my rating.
Humanity is interconnected across generations -- the drive for power and fight for justice, the need for storytelling and compulsion to share one's experience, the power of the truth (or maybe not), the rise of captialism and colonialism, each innermost soul reverberating across the centuries...
Humanity is interconnected across generations -- the drive for power and fight for justice, the need for storytelling and compulsion to share one's experience, the power of the truth (or maybe not), the rise of captialism and colonialism, each innermost soul reverberating across the centuries...
I was hoping it would be more cohesive than the movie but it seemed like the birth mark was the only real tie between the characters.