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3.99 AVERAGE
3.99 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
funny
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
SUCH a cool concept of interweaving 6 seeminging unconnected stories across hundreds of years. I need to read this again!!
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
reflective
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
mysterious
slow-paced
adventurous
challenging
emotional
hopeful
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This book really captured my attention. I have never read another book like it and the way there were six different stories and they all tied together was really cool. I did get kind of fatigued towards the end. Ada’s journal was hard to get through but the end tied the book up with a bow.
emotional
slow-paced
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Well slap my knee, Mitchell did it again!
If David Mitchell and Mark Danielewski got together to write a novel, I believe the result would forever alter my perception of human consciousness.
If David Mitchell and Mark Danielewski got together to write a novel, I believe the result would forever alter my perception of human consciousness.
Okay so I'm giving Cloud Atlas a five stars but that five star rating comes with an explanation and that explanation is a fairly long one.
I remember when the trailers for the movie first started rolling out a few years ago and despite being greatly confused by yellowface Hugo Weaving in the trailers I remember being pretty interested in the concept, and then lo and behold I forgot that the story even existed. Flash forward to a week and a half ago and I was reading this as recommended to me and was bored out of my skull/confused trying to plod through the novel's first POV story The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing. Now, the structure of the novel is part of what makes it so interesting and quite frankly a large part of why I read through it so fast, all things considered. As each POV is introduced (excluding the super-fun-special POV that spans the middle section of the book) it is essentially cut in half, split right don the middle, and book-ended onto the former and latter halves of the book. Knowing that, despite having spent the majority of the first half of Ewing's POV bored out of my skull and overwhelmingly confused as to why I was reading from the perspective of this strange sailor, the POV cut off and I was left wondering what in the hell was waiting for me once the POVs boomeranged back around and I got to see from his perspective again.
From this point on I found myself completely enthralled with all of the other characters and their stories (okay maybe not Cavendish but he was a down on his luck asshole and I was at the very least interested to see where he'd end up), falling in love with the characters and the brilliant world building that we as readers are only able to experience bits of through the texts we're given like interviews, letters, diary entries, etc. The varied literary styles right down to how the information is "recorded" managed to keep the stories feeling fresh through both halves of their telling. Each story effectively manages to feel like there is one small common thread weaving its way through each of these stories and while in some of the stories it is far larger than in some, each still feels intrinsically connected to the others very neatly.
One of the more clever ways that the stories stay connected as well (not that the birth mark thing isn't creative but ya know) are through the symbolic and thematic ties between them. Each story in the novel includes themes of classism, racism, violence or lack thereof, reincarnation, etc etc etc. These ties between them added little bits of depth to each story that made boomeranging back around again extremely interesting given the newfound knowledge gained. That, and I can't help but admit how much I enjoyed the classist revolution undertones-that-became-overtones in one particular story.
In short, the structure of this novel does wonderfully to make six stories even more interesting than they would have been had they been presented as short stories (minus maybe Cavendish and Ewing but hey that's just me and upon rereading, I'm sure I would find them horribly interesting because I wouldn't be sitting through them begging to get back to Sonmi or Frobisher), but highlights even more that some are far stronger than others. Quite frankly I could read an entire novel set in the world of Sonmi or Frobisher, but what makes these stories work are the limits that we are given through our narrators, and their related themes, characters, and worlds. Cannot recommend the book enough, and I might just have to go back and reread this again...
I remember when the trailers for the movie first started rolling out a few years ago and despite being greatly confused by yellowface Hugo Weaving in the trailers I remember being pretty interested in the concept, and then lo and behold I forgot that the story even existed. Flash forward to a week and a half ago and I was reading this as recommended to me and was bored out of my skull/confused trying to plod through the novel's first POV story The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing. Now, the structure of the novel is part of what makes it so interesting and quite frankly a large part of why I read through it so fast, all things considered. As each POV is introduced (excluding the super-fun-special POV that spans the middle section of the book) it is essentially cut in half, split right don the middle, and book-ended onto the former and latter halves of the book. Knowing that, despite having spent the majority of the first half of Ewing's POV bored out of my skull and overwhelmingly confused as to why I was reading from the perspective of this strange sailor, the POV cut off and I was left wondering what in the hell was waiting for me once the POVs boomeranged back around and I got to see from his perspective again.
From this point on I found myself completely enthralled with all of the other characters and their stories (okay maybe not Cavendish but he was a down on his luck asshole and I was at the very least interested to see where he'd end up), falling in love with the characters and the brilliant world building that we as readers are only able to experience bits of through the texts we're given like interviews, letters, diary entries, etc. The varied literary styles right down to how the information is "recorded" managed to keep the stories feeling fresh through both halves of their telling. Each story effectively manages to feel like there is one small common thread weaving its way through each of these stories and while in some of the stories it is far larger than in some, each still feels intrinsically connected to the others very neatly.
One of the more clever ways that the stories stay connected as well (not that the birth mark thing isn't creative but ya know) are through the symbolic and thematic ties between them. Each story in the novel includes themes of classism, racism, violence or lack thereof, reincarnation, etc etc etc. These ties between them added little bits of depth to each story that made boomeranging back around again extremely interesting given the newfound knowledge gained. That, and I can't help but admit how much I enjoyed the classist revolution undertones-that-became-overtones in one particular story.
In short, the structure of this novel does wonderfully to make six stories even more interesting than they would have been had they been presented as short stories (minus maybe Cavendish and Ewing but hey that's just me and upon rereading, I'm sure I would find them horribly interesting because I wouldn't be sitting through them begging to get back to Sonmi or Frobisher), but highlights even more that some are far stronger than others. Quite frankly I could read an entire novel set in the world of Sonmi or Frobisher, but what makes these stories work are the limits that we are given through our narrators, and their related themes, characters, and worlds. Cannot recommend the book enough, and I might just have to go back and reread this again...
adventurous
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Holy shit. I wasn't aware that was something an author could do.