52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
52. Cloud atlas.
I read this six years ago, right at the beginning of this meme, and dug it out again to loan to a friend who had read the casting rumors about the upcoming (possible) movie. Couldn’t remember more than that I’d enjoyed it, so I read it again. Imagines the death of Civilization through snapshots of its decline; our choices, good and bad, determine our outcomes, including the extinction of both our nobility and our species. The characters reincarnate from story to story; the stories form a nested V, bisecting each other one by one with the central story being farthest in the future and the novel’s beginning and end being farthest in the past, those two stories essentially mirroring each other to form a bookend. It’s ambitious, as is Mitchell’s determination to write in multiple voices and genres in a single book, and to make the entire narrative a sort of palimpsest of documents. Still a remarkable book, but I feel like I have perspective on its outlook that I didn’t have then. Frighteningly good, woefully unhopeful for humanity, desperately in need of a glimpse of Salvation. I highly recommend it.
