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Dec 09, 2011

tim rated it:

Number9Dream, what is a relatively administered star-rating system compared to the joy I experience while reading you? Faults and all.

I don't completely understand everything you revealed with my mind awake, but your echo resonates lucidly through my dreamtime. You say: "Time may be what stops everything happening at once, but rules are different asleep." How I know this to be true, yet could never prove.

Fantasies and dreams. Cause and effect. Repeated conclus More...

10 comments like (21 people liked it)

Jan 10, 2012

Stephen M rated it:

*****DISCLAIMER******
WARNING!!!!!! This review is written by a certified David Mitchell fanboy©. Anyone who is offended/perturbed/irked/insulted/off-put/annoyed/aggrieved/disgruntled by gushing fanaticism,
STOP READING NOW.
For the rest of you, come stay a while. You’re cool. Not like all them haters.
We’ll whip ‘em off.

*********Actual Review***********
So yeah, another five stars to D. Mitch. I felt compelled to write a proper review for this guy since it is More...

0 comments like (11 people liked it)

Aug 31, 2008

Ben rated it:

Somewhat disappointing, but only because I have such high expectations of Mitchell.

This is a coming of age tale set in Japan. A boy sets off to Tokyo to find the father he has never known. It contains all the Mitchell elements, but just not quite at the same level of his later novels. I have not read his first novel, Ghostwritten, yet so I don't know if it is similar in that respect. However, it is still a very well written and enjoyable book...though I'll admit the plot gets a tad f More...

3 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jan 21, 2012

Shovelmonkey1 rated it:

Mild Seven
Parliament
Cabin
Peace
Kent
Hope
Philip Morris
Marlborough Light

That's the number of different cigarette brands cited and smoked in this novel. Frankly, it's a good job that this book only covers 8 weeks in the life of narrator and protagonist, Eeji Miyake, because he's unlikely to live for too much longer.

Follow Miyake as he smokes, gurns, fantasises and bull-shits his way around Tokyo trying to find his long-lost Pops and e More...

12 comments like (11 people liked it)

Jan 21, 2008

Micha rated it:

“Maybe the meaning of life lies in looking for it.” “Who is right? Individually, we all are. Generally, none of us are.”

I have always been one to look for meaning in everything I do. Call me an idealist or a fool, I NEED to know that there is more, so much more. David Mitchell's book has given me hope to believe that there still is meaning in today's world. As the naive narrator, a youth from the country, journeys into the heart of the fast-paced, overwhelming Tokyo, he learns more a More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 08, 2011

Patrick rated it:

About three years ago a friend gave me a copy of a novel written by an English teacher living in Hiroshima. I had expected not to like it and was pleasantly surprised and wrote a book review, which became my first professional journalistic piece (i.e. I was paid for it), it was a book review of David Mitchell's impressive debut, Ghostwritten.

It wasn't until recently that I read his follow up, number9dream (2001), I'm not sure why I waited so long, since, I, myself, had pointed out th More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 03, 2012

Moonbutterfly rated it:

Mitchell is a good writer but he writes in such a frantic over-the-top style that is not appealing to me. This style of writing wears me out. Where Haruki Murakami is warm and subtle, Mitchell hits you over the head and leaves you bleeding. In this novel Mitchell shows his excess and doesn't give the reader time to breath.

The time shifts didn't bother me and I rather liked them, but Mitchell's dream worlds are cold and sterile. The does follow the idea of isolation and abandonment t More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 03, 2009

Tara rated it:

number9dream was nearly as awesome as cloud atlas--and still a 5 star novel.

this book demonstrates one of the things i love most about mitchell--his ability to write in a number of different voices convincingly within the same novel (hardboiled/cyberpunk/actiony, the weird and whimsical goatwriter stories, the diary of a japanese soldier in WW2), which he accomplishes here without sacrificing the clarity and honesty of his narrator's voice. eiji miyake is one of the most likeable More...

5 comments like (4 people liked it)

Feb 09, 2008

Tori rated it:

Mitchell is definitely one of my new favorite persons. I'm no good at describing other's writing styles and therefore restrict myself to "enviable" and "perfect". Mitchell has great capacity for capturing specific voices (and time periods, which is wonderfully evident in Cloud Atlas) and for noting detail in a way that fascinates and entertains. He tends to drop the reader in the middle of things and doesn't necessarily wait for them to catch up, but it's fun picking up the m More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 16, 2007

Liz rated it:

I probably shouldn't be giving this any stars because I didn't even finish it. This was a book club read and none of us got through it, not even the most die-hard David Mitchell fans. I guess this is proof positive that a knack for writing will not save your book if you have nothing particular to say. As one person in our group described it, reading this book is like watching a musician play his scales very, very well---but after a while, you just want to hear him play an actual song for a susta More...

2 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jul 12, 2007

Andrew rated it:

David Mitchell is the novelist whose NEXT book I'm most excited about. What will he do next? He's such an architectural virtuoso- the complicated forms his novels take are a palpable delight. But the meat of the material is strong, too. It's not empty filigree. This book is especially powerful. It has a very simple plot- a young man from a rural Japanese island comes to Tokyo to look for his birth father. No matter how outrageous the literary hijinks it performs, the book never betrays the fierc More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 21, 2010

Alex added it

I found Number9Dream rewarding and frustrating in equal measure. The book follows a naive, video-game obsessed country boy named Eiji Miyake on his quest to find his father in a hyper-modern Tokyo. Miyake makes his way through the low-wage world of video stores, pizza delivery shacks, and love motels. In the course of his search gets mixed up with bloodthirsty Yakuza gang, falls for a beautiful waitress who also happens to be a brilliant pianist, and is taken under the wing of a debauched young More...

1 comment like

Jan 08, 2012

Holly rated it:

In traditional quest fashion Eiji moves to Tokoyo to find his father who left his mom before he and his twin sister were born. Eiji is young and on his own for the first time in a huge city where he knows no one. He knows only details about his father (he doesn't even know his name) and tries to piece together a meeting, bumping into a series characters whose crime-riddled escapades pull Eiji into violent altercations.

Rollercoaster ride of a novel; many if not all of the nine chapter More...

0 comments like

Nov 07, 2011

Steve rated it:

You know those compound German constructions, like schadenfreude, comprised of dissimilar single words? Well, I’ve got a new one that ought to exist if it doesn’t already. It’s schadenselbstungeduld, which translates roughly to “the sadness of your own impatience.” Maybe you can guess why I’m bringing this up. I’ve had a bad case of it since last month when I joined the ranks of several Goodreads friends who have read all five of the David Mitchell books. We’re now waiting long days, weeks, More...

27 comments like (11 people liked it)

Oct 20, 2011

Gerritt rated it:

I didn't like this book very much. Around halfway through I found myself wishing it would just end already, looking at the page counter at the bottom of the screen. Someone on Wikipedia (as of 10/20/2011) seems to think the narrative style is full of complex mediations on the nature of reality and fantasy, but what it felt like to me was that Mitchell couldn't think of a way to stretch out the story long enough to fill a publisher's page count.

Eiji Miyake (whose name we're constantl More...

0 comments like

Feb 15, 2011

John rated it:

David Mitchell makes it easy for readers to compare him to Haruki Murkami, what with his inventive storytelling, pop cultural flow, and expert unraveling of a mystery. Number9dream ups the Murakami ante by being set in modern Japan with a 20-something protagonist, somewhat resembling Kafka on the Shore (hell, Eiji the protagonist even laments the fact that he couldn't finish a certain book about a man stuck in a well). Number9dream, however, beats Kafka on the Shore in enjoyability.

Fir More...

0 comments like

Sep 01, 2010

Parksy rated it:

Love his writing style, but he can be a little scattered in his plot devices and themes. Still very readable.

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Amazon.com
David Mitchell's second novel, Number9Dream, tells the story of Eiji Miyake, a young man negotiating a hypermodern and dangerous Tokyo to meet for the first time his secretive and powerful father. Naïve and fresh from the Japanese countryside, Eiji encounters every obstacle imaginable in his quest, from his father's--and in- More...

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Sep 01, 2010

Lee rated it:

The books is about a young man trying to find his father. What happens along the way is what makes up the crux of this book. Reading it reminded me of the phrase, "It's not the destination, but the getting there." On the "getting there" to find his father, the protagonist endures some horrific things.
Eiji Miyake, now 20 years old has left his sleepy island town and has come to Tokyo in search of his father. Eiji's only connection is a lawyer working at the large Pan More...

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Jun 01, 2010

Ryan rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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Feb 03, 2008

Martha rated it:

Another fantastic book from David Mitchell. This one is told by 20-year-old Eiji Miyake as he begins the search for his father in Tokyo. Mitchell uses day dreams, diaries, letters, short stories, phone calls and more to tell the story. I suppose you would call it a coming of age tale, but it is like no other story in that category. Mitchell gives Eiji such a terrific voice and he paints such a vivid picture of Tokyo and the characters that live there. I highly recommend it!

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 04, 2011

Jennifer rated it:

I'm going to agree with several other reviewers that this book kind of got off to a slow start, but ultimately I ended up loving it. I want to say that I really could have done without the "goatwriter" character and that I felt his appearance really disrupted the flow of the novel, but suspect that maybe I didn't quite get the symbolism.

As N9D was labeled a coming-of-age story, I could only associate the fantastic tone of the goatwriter passages with a regression to childho More...

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Oct 29, 2009

Taka rated it:

4.5, actually--

I liked it a lot more than his magnum opus, Cloud Atlas, which was more gimmicky and less emotionally involving. Perhaps I'm also biased for anything Japanese.

David Mitchell's prose in this work manages to be elegant and humorous as well as Protean in crafting diverse narrative voices. The plot, too, was entertaining, compromised only by some detours - daydreams in the first chapter, the entire Goatwriter tales in Chapter 5, and random dreams in Chapter 8. More...

1 comment like

Mar 06, 2009

Scott rated it:

Mitchell too often describes things not for the sake of precision, artistry, or world-building, but rather for the sake of entertainment. Much of his inventiveness and linguistic strength—and the guy can write like fiend—seems to be deployed for entertainment purposes. Similar to Tom Robbins in this regard. Robbins has some inventive metaphors and language, but none of it is to be taken as serious description of phenomena.
You’ll notice that Mitchell’s mode is a constant slight exaggeratio More...

0 comments like

Jan 16, 2012

Linda rated it:

I read this years ago in high school and even wrote a book report about it (which I found on my computer). But I only vaguely remember it.

Excerpt from my book report: "Number9Dream follows 20 year old Eiji Miyake on his search through Tokyo, Japan to find his father. His father abandoned him, his mother, and his twin sister Anju because his mother was his father’s mistress, not his real wife. Eiji’s mother was an alcoholic who was mentally unfit to raise her children. [...] Thr More...

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Oct 21, 2011

Michael rated it:

So far my least favorite of David Mitchell's books, but still worth reading. I'll spare the comparisons to Joyce/Murakami/etc., since all the other reviews cover that ground well enough.

In this story of a young man from rural Japan in Tokyo looking for his father, Mitchell walks a tightrope between literary pyrotechnics and character and plot. After a first reading, I'm not sure I correctly assigned all of the story elements to reality or fantasy, but I'm OK with that. The emotion More...

0 comments like

Nov 15, 2011

Jonathan rated it:

I admired his first novel, the ingeniously circular Ghostwritten<\i>; was overawed by his audacious reincarnation epic Cloud Atlas<\i>; and loved Black Swan Green<\i>, a rite-of-passage tale set unexpectedly in a modern village near Upton-on-Severn. So it was with eagerness that I set about his second novel, number9dream<\i>. And I wasn't disappointed. As a stylist, Mitchell has talent to burn: descriptions, dialogue, vocabulary, structure, are all executed with masterly More...

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Dec 16, 2009

Audrey rated it:

I was really disappointed by this book. It was well-written but it couldn't compare to Cloud Atlas, or even Ghostwritten. David Mitchell is a fantastic writer, but it felt like I was reading Haruki Murakami. If I had wanted to reread Kafka on the Shore or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I would have. This was Mitchell's second effort, so maybe he was in a sophomore slump? I still have high hopes for Black Swan Green.

3 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 30, 2010

Bettie rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 16, 2010

Amanda rated it:

I have heard great things about David Mitchell, but never bothered to read one of his books. With all of the rave reviews his newest book "The thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" is getting I decided it was time to dive in.

I went with "Number 9 Dream," since the review at the book store compared this particular book to that of a Murakami novel, and Murakami is by far one of my favorite authors.

Overall the book was really good, would I compare it to More...

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Jan 11, 2009

Mari rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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