Cloud Atlas
From David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, award-winning writer and one of the featured authors in Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists 2003” issue, comes his highly anticipated third novel, a work of mind-bending imagination and scope. A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; an ambitious journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing the mendicant and violent family of his star author; a genetically modified “dinery server” on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation -- the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other’s echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small. In his captivating third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity’ s dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us
Stats for nerds
27recommend
51mentions
47people
2010–2026years
59% recommend41% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- 20 years ago I read a The Guardian article about the "top geek novels". I immediately read a bunch of those.
Recently I managed to find the list again, and it's been endless pleasure:
- American Gods -- Neil Gaiman
- Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley
- The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett
- Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks
- Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson
- Cloud Atlas -- David Mitchell
- The Diamond Age -- Neal Stephenson
- The Dispossessed -- Ursula K Le Guin
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick
- Dune -- Frank Herbert
- Foundation -- Isaac Asimov
- Giles Goat-Boy -- John Barth
- Gravity's Rainbow -- Thomas Pynchon
- The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams
- I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov
- The Illuminatus! Trilogy -- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
- The Left Hand of Darkness -- Ursula K Le Guin
- The Man in the High Castle -- Philip K Dick
- Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland
- Neuromancer -- William Gibson
- Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell
- Orlando -- Virgina Woolf
- The Shockwave Rider -- John Brunner
- Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson
- Stand on Zanzibar -- John Brunner
- Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein
- Trouble with lichen - John Wyndham
- UBIK -- Philip Dick
- Watchmen -- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
- Woman on the Edge of Time -- Marge Piercy
(I am creatively interpreting "The Colour of Magic" as "all Discworld", "Dune" as "the six Dune books", etc.)
- Excellent essay.
To those who enjoyed it so much as to come here and read these comments, I'd suggest to fetch a copy of David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas", and appreciate the multiple style changes between the various sections.
- Gideon the Ninth - this was a huge surprise to me and lots of fun. I've never read anything else quite like it.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August - This is usually my go-to book recommendation for "whats your favorite book"
Mortal Engines - The first book of a surprisingly poignant YA series which is not only fun throughout, but has one of the greatest and most thought provoking endings of all time.
Cloud Atlas - A beautifuly written story that somehow manages to intertwine separate narratives across time.
Children of Time - A wonderful story about time, evolution, survival and what it means to be human.
- Cloud Atlas would be my choice for fiction. The novel covers an incredible range of interesting ideas and great writing.
Antifragile for nonfiction. It really changed the way I think about how both the natural world and human institutions function.
- I truly loved Cloud Atlas. It's also a rare example where the book and movie adaptation both lift each other up (though I saw the movie first, and can't know if I would have felt that way in the other direction). I felt like the movie is better at emphasizing the thematic connection between each story, while the book is better at showing the impact of each story on the next, and showing that each story exists for the characters in the next. I loved the movie even more after reading the book.
- I found the book even better and started reading more novels from David Mitchell. "Cloud Atlas" is still my favorite of his books. A lot of his essays are available online via The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/davidmitchell
