Cloud Atlas in Metafilter

Apr 19, 2011 Jessica rated it it was amazing

Shelves: re-reads, book-club

The first time I read Cloud Atlas, it was definitely a five-star book for me. This time I'm still letting it slide in at five, but I feel a little less emphatic about that, maybe just because I've read more books that play with structure since then, or maybe because the whole thing felt just a little TOO cleverly done this time around, like Mitchell wanted to make sure you knew how smart he was being.

Regardless, though, Mitchell is a breathtaking writer, even when he's playing with genres and no ...more

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Oct 07, 2009 Matt rated it really liked it

Somewhere in the middle of reading Cloud Atlas, I noticed how prevalent the theme of the apocalypse has been in contemporary culture. It’s in literature, be it low-brow (the Left Behind series) or high-brow (The Road). It’s in movies (I Am Legend, 28 Days Later, Zombieland). It’s in graphic novels (Ys, the Last Man). Cloud Atlas, too, fits into this trajectory – like The Road, the specifics of the Apocalypse are never revealed, but we do get the before and the after.
The book is structured as a p ...more

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Nov 04, 2011 Danica rated it liked it

Another reread from when I was eighteen years old. This book isn’t as forthrightly enjoyable as Number9dream, which was this headlong surge into urban surrealism and ultraviolence and rivening familial loss and the travails of being a lovelorn story-tinkerer in an immense and alienating metropolis. Cloud Atlas is a very self-consciously thinky project that constantly calls attention to its own fictiveness. (Same’s true of Number9dream, except in CA the tale-spinner’s an even more pronounced pres ...more

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