The Bone Clocks
Following a scalding row with her mother, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: a sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as "the radio people," Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life. For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics -- and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly's life, affecting all the people Holly loves -- even the ones who are not yet born. A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting from occupied Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list -- all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
12mentions
11people
2014–2025years
67% recommend25% neutral8% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The best works of fiction I read:
- Count Belisarius by Robert Graves
- The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
- The Expanse (all of them)
- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
And the best books on software development were:
- Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach by Mark Richards and Neal Ford
- Multithreaded JavaScript by Thomas Hunter II and Bryan English
- The Programmer's Brain by Felienne Hermans
- The Bone Clocks is fantastic - probably my #1 go-to when someone asks me for a book recommendation.
- If you enjoyed The Bone Clocks, consider trying the other books in that same universe. Like The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (particularly if you enjoy its historical setting of Edo period Japan on the artificial island of Deshima where the Dutch were allowed to operate a trading post), or the shorter Slade House.
Of course Cloud Atlas is well-known and a good read.
Utopia Avenue, his latest work about a fictional band in the 1960s, is a very pleasant and frankly fun read too, although different from the others. In typical Mitchell fashion, it does loosely connect to his other works and that weird über-narrative he is building. I'm looking forward to see what he'll end up doing with that.
- The Bone Clocks and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet are both greatly entertaining novels as well (and tangentially related to both, the shorter novel Slade House).
Personally I found these more enjoyable than Cloud Atlas, which is good and a must-read nonetheless, but relies a lot on its narrative structure for its effect (this is not a negative, but the Matryoshka doll structure of the book does define it rather strongly).
- Books are wonderful. There's value in online articles and conversations, but you are likely depriving yourself of a few layers of nuance and enjoyment. No time to start like the present.
Step one: get a library card, and then download the app they provide to access books on your tablets and phone. Then power move find the option to look for "Skip the Line" or equivalent to get a list of books other people are waiting months to read in a queue. Thank me later.
Step two: start listening to audiobooks. You'll start at 1x speed and then gradually move up to 2x, depending on the type of book you're listening to and whether the narrator has an accent. I get through a book every two days by listening during my morning prep, when I'm walking or biking. You will find yourself slowing down to finish chapters in no time. Audiobooks are incredible. There are haters; they are wrong.
I recommend switching up between fiction and non-fiction, otherwise I get exhausted. I like business books (Shoedog by Phil Knight, or The Hard Thing About Hard Things) and books about behavioural psychology; Thinking, Fast and Slow is excellent, so is anything by Malcolm Gladwell. Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari are both great. Authors like Dan Ariely and the Steves that wrote Freakonomics.
Lots of audiobooks are pleasurable in a special way because they are read by the author. For example, literally every book by David Sedaris is best enjoyed when read by David Sedaris. This is also true of good biographies; Failure Is An Option by H. Jon Benjamin will get you kicked out of a restaurant because you'll be laughing so hard.
Fiction is a really personal realm, but I prefer sci-fi and some fantasy. I read Cryptonomicon in my early 20s and loved it, but listening to it in my early 40s was a transcendant joy. Don't be scared by the runtime - you won't want it to end. Other authors I happen to enjoy very much include David Mitchell (Thousand Autumns or Bone Clocks FTW), Cory Doctorow (Makers, Walkaway), Blake Crouch (Recursion), Daniel Suarez (Influx, Delta-V, Daemon), Robin Sloan (Sourdough, Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore).
Just to wrap up and repeat what has no doubt been said elsewhere in the thread, fiction in particular is the gateway to empathy and imagination. Reading is a muscle; it gets easier and then it gets addictive. There's a reason people keep doing it, unlike yoga. ;)
- Lots of good stuff in this thread. Two books I haven't seen are Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas. The only thing is, you can't Google them, for risk of spoilers.
Also, the movie based on Cloud Atlas is not great.
