In the course of his exploits, he finds the Pacific diary we've read and searches for the rest of it. The Pacific diaries end mid-sentence, and the book shifts to the letters of a dissipated, scheming young composer in 1931. It's a nested box of stories, each one a virtuosic performance in an entirely different style from the last. Why bother, because Mitchell's book seemed like everything I couldn't do. I was working on a novel and I just stopped. I didn't write for months after reading it. It turned out that everyone was right, including my friend who suspected it was too brilliant. What he was describing didn't sound like the book I had started and I decided just to get it over with. He was in the middle of the second installment of "Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery," which wasn't his favorite section - his favorite section was the futuristic "An Orison of Sonmi~451" - but it didn't matter, he said, because it was all so good. Then a friend of his cornered me for a long, raving monologue. He loved it, but he said, "I don't know if it's your kind of novel," which I took as a direct challenge. And I moved on to something that seemed more pressing.Īfter I put it aside, my boyfriend picked up Cloud Atlas. A friend said, "That book seemed a little too brilliant for me." It seemed only baffling to me, and not what I expected. It begins with the 19th-century diary of an American notary in the Pacific, which I found hard to follow. I don't have time to find out if the stranger at a party who's going on about some novel is wrong.īut Cloud Atlas kept coming up, so I started it. And there are so many books I know I want to read and only a few people I know I can trust. The writer Anthony Doerr laid out the math for me: If you read about a book a week, and you're lucky enough to have 50 good adult years of reading time, you'll read 2,500 books in your life. People started telling me to read David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas three years ago and I told them I would, as I do when someone grabs my sleeve and says, "This book is really good." But I don't always believe them, and I don't always read it. She recently married her longtime boyfriend, in spite of his telling her that Cloud Atlas might not be her kind of novel. She was born and raised in Montana and now lives in Los Angeles. Maile Meloy is the author of the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter.
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