Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Novel of the First Rank

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

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Around the turn of the 19th century, Dutch clerk Jacob de Zoet agrees to take a post with the Dutch East India Company with the trading port of Dejima near Nagasaki, Japan. He hopes that during his five year stint he can amass a fortune enough to impress his beloved’s father and get him to allow the marriage. A humble, pious man, de Zoet is a terrible fit for the society on Dejima, where corruption and dishonesty are the rule. Jacob struggles to get along […]

lovely, stinking, brutal, sunburned, magical, and filthy.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

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Jacob de Zoet is a young man of meager means. He has hitched his hopes to the Dust East India Company- he’ll spend several trading seasons on Dejima- about as far away from home and his fiancée as he can physically be. What is Dejima? Why, I’m glad you asked! The year is 1799, and Japan is very strict in regards to foreign interference and influence. Following disasters interactions with the Spanish and Portuguese decades earlier, Japan is a closed empire. Dejima, a man-made island […]

And everything is rocking out of control/When we hit Japan

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

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I don’t even know where to start with this one. Historical fiction tends to be a pretty dense read, and David Mitchell tends to write pretty dense books, and my mind is swirling after finishing The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. First, let me say that this book could have really used a good Cast of Characters page or two. Broken into three main sections (followed by two more epilogue-y sections), each is full of secondary and tertiary characters who are introduced once, disappear […]

If you like David Mitchell, you’ll probably like it.

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

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Hello! I love David Mitchell. Sometimes I don’t understand David Mitchell. Recently I learned he’s only 52, i.e., a couple of months *younger* than me, and so much younger than he was in my head, and was all, “You bastard!” But what has any of that to do with The Bone Clocks? Why, nothing at all! The Bone Clocks is somewhat similar in structure to Cloud Atlas, though not as complicated…structurally. It’s plenty complicated. There are immortals among us! There are good immortals and bad […]

Dean hurries past the Phoenix Theatre, dodges a blind man in dark glass, steps onto Charing Cross Road to overtake a slow-moving woman and pram, leaps a grimy puddle, and swerves onto Denmark Street where he skids on a sheet of black ice.

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

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The new David Mitchell novel (Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks, Black Swan Green) that came out this summer. The novels begins in the mid 1960s in London as Dean Moss, a talented by hapless bass guitarist, has been kicked out of his apartment and out of his band. As he looks for a place to live, some money, and a gig, he meets Levon, a Canadian music manager, who convinces him to come to a show to see a guitarist. As the evening unfolds it […]

It’s kind of a lot (but that’s ok)

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

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I liked this, but at the same time, I’m experiencing a potentially problematic personal issue where I’m getting pretty fatigued by multi-POV “but like, how are they all connected, man?” stories. Which is (reductively) David Mitchell’s main wheelhouse. Sorry Dave! The problem is that, inevitably, there are some stories/sections I care about a lot, and others where I don’t quite connect to the character and with their relation to the greater plot. This was definitely the case with Cloud Atlas, the only other Mitchell book […]



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