Recent Reads:

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. Does this book have a central theme? I don't know, but I enjoyed it anyway. Mitchell tells a series of connected stories that span several hundred years, ranging from the narrative of a South Seas traveller to the picaresque letters of an eighteenth-century musician to the machinations of a mystery novel to a science-fictional world of cloned beings to a postapocalyptic setting reminiscent of Riddly Walker or On The Beach. As one of the blurbs on the cover duly notes, Mitchell pulls off the distinctive voice of each genre in a convincing manner, which makes for an entertaining writerly tour-de-force.