Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.

half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.

As an experienced editor I disapprove of flashbacks, fore-shadowings and tricksy devices, they belong in the 1980s with MAs in postmodernism and chaos theory.