4.5 stars. I inhaled this slim David Mitchell novel in just a few hours yesterday. I was so pleased by Cloud Atlas earlier this year that I nearly jumped for joy when I heard he was putting out a haunted house story just in time for Halloween. I hardly ever dabble in the horror genre, but I’m glad I made an exception. While this book was definitely creepy, it wasn’t overly scary. It propelled me to keep reading and find out what happened next, but […]
The Only Thing Constant In Life Is Change
“What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.” I literally tried and failed 3 times to get into this book over several years, but I didn’t succeed until the 4th try. I have to say that it was definitely worth the effort! The problem was that in a book with 6 narrators, it begins with the least interesting and least accessible storyline. If you can just make it through the difficult […]
“Everybody has a heart that can be touched by something.”
My book club’s May/June book is The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida (David Mitchell of Cloud Atlas fame spearheaded its English translation). I don’t personally know anyone on the autism spectrum, but I have acquaintances affected by this and I am always eager to learn more about the way we are and what it means to be a child with special needs and how they see the world differently than I. Naoki Higashida is a young man in Japan who was lucky enough to […]
Some books are a meal, The Bone Clocks is a banquet.
Even if you personally have a hand in a battle against good and evil that shook the very pillars of Heaven, when the smoke clears and the evil is vanquished eventually life will return to normal. While you were locked in your own high stakes fight billions of others walk through their day with their own joys and miseries, burdens and triumphs. While you may have won this particular battle ultimately you can’t save the world. The best you can do is save those you […]
Fun story. But fire the editor, please.
Eiji Miyaki is a young man in search of his father. In a modern, Japanese, coming-of-age tale, he doesn’t meet his father but if his goal in meeting him was to learn something about himself, well that happens in spades. Eiji’s father is fiercely protective of his paternity and keeps a watchdog lawyer and assorted Yakuza goons to keep Eiji from meeting him. The story meanders through derailments on Eiji’s journey. When Eiji hits a roadblock, or is planning a next step, he frequently diverts into […]
Equally interesting questions and answers
The Reason I Jump was written by a 13 year old Japanese boy with autism. David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green, has a son with autism, and as he explains in the forward to this book, the first thing a parent does when their child has been diagnosed with autism is, research the hell out of it. While most things written about autism come from either the parents of affected children or doctors, Mitchell stumbled across this first hand account by Naoki Higashida, and had […]
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