Name: Cloud Atlas
Rating: 4.035256410256411 (312 reviews)
ISBN: 9780345807472

David Stephen Mitchell

The book reveals how disparate people connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.

Cloud Atlas

Klára Kováčiková 

As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself and moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.

She holds forth like a man and smokes myrrhy cigarettes through a rhino horn holder.

When one unlocks a woman´s body, her box of confidences also spills.

One writes music because winter is eternal and because if one didn´t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one´s throat all the sooner.

Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, are another wonder of Outside to me.

Snow´s whites are bruised lilacs in half light.

True knowledge without experience is food without sustenance.

She was too, blue same as the ocean and if you weren´t looking right at her you would not see her.

There ain´t no journey that won´t change you some.

But ain´t dyin´ terrorsome cold if there ain´t nothin´after?

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, and tho a clouds shape nor hue nor size don´t stay the same it´s still a cloud and so is a soul.

Newborn sunshine slants through ancient oaks and dances on a lost river. Look, Joe, herons. 

David Mitchell

Recounts the connected stories of people from the past and the distant future, from a nineteenth-century notary and an investigative journalist in the 1970s to a young man who searches for meaning in a post-apocalyptic world.

a Novel

Paul Baggaley

I can appreciate the quality of this book, with it's six loosely connected stories spanning hundreds of years, each written from a different perspective in a different voice. Ultimately, though, I found it quite unsatisfying. I'm amazed that someone thought this might make a good movie, and will be interested to see how they go about it. Worth a read if you want something different - you may love it, admiring it's well crafted writing and subtly pervasive themes, or you may find it utterly confusing without enough glue to hold these disparate narratives together. Or you may be like me, and be caught somewhere in the middle between admiration and frustration. 

Colton Ray

It was interesting and unique and I didn't understand it at all.

A Novel

Amna A.

"Your life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"

Loved each individual story, perfectly crafted, but found the links connecting them tenuous and pointless

an unexpected delight for me, as someone who has read this before and seen the movie and considered the film’s thematic criss-crossing structure more fitting than the expanding, nested structure of the book but they both have their merits. a bit of a light in very dark times, about how the legacy of courage can inspire others in ways big or small and how story mediums can persist and carry those stories. wished the wrap-up wasn’t so hasty for some of the stories but otherwise this was a lush reading experience - Mitchell makes it look easy.

Cloud Atlass isn't any singular discernible thing, it's not a novel, its not even a set of short stories. It's a sideways glance at the history of humanity, past, present and future, told with six distinct personalities. 

I feel that to review this book from an objective standpoint rather than an emotional one would prove as monumental a task as it must have been to write it. So instead I'm going to suggest that anyone from any walk of life that has any vague interest should read this book and enjoy its persepctive.

Briar's Reviews

This was one of my favorite books I've ever read - it sits up there with 1984 and Hamlet. I read this initially for a school project back in grade twelve, and I have since read it numerous times for fun.

Each story links up with each other and a variety of themes is discussed -women's rights, human rights, sexuality, etc. Each individual story brings out many individual themes and the entire book as a whole brings a theme of how people link together in some way.

I can't speak enough about wonderful this book is, and how much I adore David Mitchell. 

Pick up this book! It is fabulous and deserves a bigger crowd!

Five out of five stars! I would give it more stars if possible!

Peter Read

Read it on vacation. Turned out to be the perfect vacation book... long, gripping, fast to read and it makes you think, but not think very hard.

Gavin

Features befitting a great book: stunning detail, well-historicised prose, engaging characters, intricate narrative structure, embrace of multiple genres. But it's too clean, somehow. 

Though it depicts predation by the worst of us; though its dystopia is one Pop-Hegel extrapolation from our current world-system, it's not as challenging as it thinks it is. 

It consists of ten sudden narrative shifts, moving back and fore four or five centuries. These sections are connected by each having a 'reader' (the opening sea journal is read by the second narrator, the Romantic composer, whose letters are obsessed over by the journalist, whose memoir is seen by the hack editor, whose tale is seen in an ancient film by the saintly clone, who is remembered as a god in the post-apocalypse story that is as far forward as we see. (They are also connected by a reincarnation overlay - but, apart from giving brutal history more chances to be brutal to the same people, I don't really get it.) 

The bit with the composer, Frobisher, is my favourite: he transcends his cheeky bohemian archetype and becomes horribly tragic despite his pig-headedness and camp pretension. 

The last line, returning to the original Victorian narrator, is a good summary of the book's wounded, pessimistic collectivism: 

  He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!’ 
Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?


So: Enjoyable and ambitious, unsatisfying.

Prashanth Srivatsa

Masterful storytelling; the book beautifully knits six stories spanning centuries, from the wild seas of the nineteenth century to a post apocalyptic, primitive future. It's a mesh of linguistic brilliance and debatable presience, displaying our will to power as a race, and the doom it's bound to bring. The book makes you think, feel and, perhaps if you're lucky, see. If you've watched the movie and thought of it as a philosophical and existential pisspot, try this. The books are always better, aren't they?

the structure is ingenius, it feels like climbing a mountain and than sowly descending. 

Story feels like remembering, waking up during the storm and free falling. 

excited to read this for the first time again sometime (if u know u know) 

the structure is ingenius, it feels like climbing a mountain and than sowly descending. 

Story feels like remembering, waking up during the storm and free falling. 

excited to read this for the first time again sometime (if u know u know) 

☁️☁️☁️

Amy Thibodeau

This book broke my brain and then put it back together again. I loved it.

Alfredo santos

One of the few books where i find that watching the movie gives you a faster comprehension amongst the stories. 
The book itself is extremely entertaining once you get the hang of the different characters and their personalities. Nevertheless, even though entertaining, I find that the book missed a little bit with the deep feeling of connection between the stories. It conveys just simple remarks between stories that thread along the book, but no deeper meaning is transmitted, i dare to say that the movie did a better job at this!.

alina s

Irene Alegre

I'll probably come back to this review later, when I'm not as mad as I am now, and might give it three stars if I'm in a good mood. Right now, however, I just almost finished (I decided I'm just not going to bother reading the last passage (thirty pages) in weird old English) Cloud Atlas and I'm kinda pissed because I just wasted a month of my reading time on a pile of intricate words that mean more or less nothing. What is the point of Cloud Atlas? Why have I read Cloud Atlas? What do I get out of it?

Entertainment? Jeez, while some parts where mildly interesting, the language in more than half of the book was painful to read. Like, I don't mind making the effort if it's worth it, but it just wasn't. AND the whole story was cryptic and confusing just for the sake of it, too.

Have I learned something? No. I just haven't. I haven't read much SF in my life, but what I've read is far more superior in terms of thought, philosophy and social criticism.

Seriously.

AND, the link between the stories was weak. Very weak. I don't know in what world that would be an original turn of events. Definitely not in mine.

PS: I forced myself to finish this since it has such great reviews and readers describe it as a life-changing book. Must have missed quite more than thirty pages.

Vilde

I've proclaimed Cloud Atlas to be one of my favourite book, and I stand by this. 

But Cloud Atlas is also not a book that I can adequately or articulately put into any kind of review. 

So bare with me, as I'm going to attempt to say something about this. Cloud Atlas is for me, one of the books that haunts me after I've completed it: making me think back and go back to the book and read certain passage again and again. Seeing connections here and there that I initially didn't notice, I can't even pinpoint to anything specific that made it resonate with me so deeply. I will admit that it was a challenge to read, it was so tough to get into. I definitely needed perserverance to get through it, but in the end it was very rewarding to have completed it. It was so good.

Cloud Atlas

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