5.57k reviews for:

Pilvikartasto

David Mitchell

3.99 AVERAGE


I still feel like is was missing something. I couldn't read this book fast enough for the details to zing together the way I think they needed to. It was interesting, and ironically, I think it will make a great movie.

I did it! I'm so proud of myself.

generally i believe this was a good book that i would reccomend, but personally it was not my style and i found it a little difficult to get through. again as said, that was only a me problem though. 

While I enjoyed all the individual stories, the connection between each of the characters and time periods wasn't very strong, and the ending was disappointing, I was expected something to tie all the characters together.

A corker of a book, a cleverly inter-linked entwined novel that plays with the idea of existence through time and space - the fifth star is missing because it's not quite the all out masterpiece that it might have been, the use of colloquial language for the Hawaii-set story is hard to get into, and perhaps everything doesn't tie up as much as it might. However this is still a tale most worthy of the telling.

This is the second time I've listened to this book. It's the kind of book I could listen to once every year and still discover amazing echoes and themes in it.

If you pressed me to pick my all time favorite book, this would probably be it.



Summer 2012 #bookaday #44

One of the most satisfying reads I've had in a long time. The overarching concept - a series of stories in different genres nested like a Russian doll - is interesting, but in the wrong hands could just feel like an exercise in cleverness. Mitchell makes each of his tales, and all the characters filling them, ring absolutely true, and the result is an incredibly finely wrought piece of work. The only reason I didn't give it the full 5 is that there were a couple throughlines and attempts to bring the stories together in ways that I found unnecessary and distracting and perhaps overly clever. But that's a tiny quibble, really. This is a truly fine book, and I look forward to reading more of his work.

Ambitious and brilliantly achieved. Courage, saviors, power, the complex cyclicity of human lives within and throughout generations/eras. Loved it.

A bit schmaltzy at times, but a stylistic tour-de-force, a "grand tour" of polyphony.

This book is as complex in its thematics as it is its stories. What is this book about? No simple summary can suffice. Love, life, death, the eternal & often futile struggle for freedom and justice.
I was skeptical about this book during the first two chapters. By the fifth I was enraptured.
This is definitely the kind of book that requires more than one read through (which in my opinion is the best kind).
"'He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!'
"Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"