Asking the Wrong Questions

I've made no secret of my admiration for Ancillary Review of Books 's podcast A Meal of Thorns . In every episodes, host Jake Cassella Brookins invites a guest—an author, critic, or academic—to discuss a single book. Selections range across genres (a recent episode focused on Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep ), discussing books new and old, famous and obscure. I guested on A Meal of Thorns last year with a discussion of Iain M. Banks's Excession , and Cassella was kind enough to invite me back in 2026. This time our topic was David Mitchell's 2004 breakout success Cloud Atlas , a novel in which six nested narratives, set in different time periods and written in different styles and genres, reveal unexpected connections, as well as a meditation on humanity's tendency towards cruelty and exploitation. As I say at the beginning of the episode, it is by no means an exaggeration to say that Cloud Atlas was one of the novels that made me. It's a book I discovere...

After a couple of dry months, reading-wise, I've gotten back on the horse in a big way and with some very fine books.  Here are my thoughts. Kraken by China Miéville - It's taken me a while to get to this book, and having finally read it the question foremost in my mind is: why?  It's strange enough that Miéville is going back to the template of a Londoner who discovers that there's a magical underworld to the city, is forced into that world, and becomes proffiicient at navigating it and affecting it--a barrel whose bottom he had already rather thoroughly scraped with King Rat and Un Lun Dun , both of which were themselves heavily derivative of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere , and which, in the intervening years, so many other writers have dipped their spoons into.  But to write this sort of story as the follow-up to the breathtakingly original The City and The City , a book that seemed to herald a new stage in Miéville's already genre-changing career, is just baf...

Via Edward Champion , we learn that Tom Tykwer ( Run Lola Run ) is trying to adapt David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas for the screen, with the help of the Wachowski brothers.  Note that this article erroneously (I hope) assumes that Tykwer's adaptation will focus on only one of the novel's six narratives, and also that there's no indication of an actual production deal in place. Champion calls Cloud Atlas 'an unfilmable novel', but I'm not sure I see how it is any more so than any other big, sprawling piece of fiction.  The nested narrative structure is unusual, but there have been plenty of films--including Run Lola Run --whose narratives were far less linear.  Unlike, say, Possession , Cloud Atlas makes the switch from story to story, period to period at only a few clearly marked locations--in that sense, the shape of the movie is predetermined, and 'all' that's left for a screenwriter is to fill in the details of each narrative.  Which of course...

Here's how you know that you've fallen in love with Jason Taylor, the narrator and protagonist of David Mitchell's fourth novel, Black Swan Green : about halfway through "January Man", the first of thirteen stories which each chronicle a month in Jason's life, he sits down to lunch with his parents and older sister. The older Taylors are distracted, primarily by a slowly-escalating cold war in which new kitchen tiles and secret mortgages are lobbed across the dining room table like ballistic missiles. Jason's sister Julia contents herself with deriding him (" Thing is being grotesque while we're eating, Mother"). The burning resentment which this brief scene elicits towards the Taylors is proof enough that Jason has caught us in his net. We have fallen, hook, line and sinker, for his point of view. We don't stop to consider that Mum and Dad are tired and that thirteen year old boys can be a pain (especially to older sisters). Within a f...

In celebration of the fact that I'm finally able to read books again (a week off seems like forever) a look at the final reads of 2005 and the first ones of 2006. The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin - Akunin's well-received historical mystery, set in 1876 Imperial Russia and starring the young and earnest Erast Fandorin, junior bureaucrat and wannabe detective, languished at the bottom of my to-be-read stack for several months before I got around to reading it. Having finished it, I can honestly say that its treat ment was well-deserved. The book's setting, as well as Akunin's arch and slightly needling narrative voice, make for an amusing read for about 50 pages, but when the novelty wears off what's left is a rather tedious spy thriller too absurd even for its semi-fantastical setting, with a protagonist so painfully dim-witted that it boggles the mind that he lives to star in several more installments in the series (three or four of the sequels have been translated...

Fucking April. Why do I get the feeling that Black Swan Green is going to be one of those books I break down and buy in hardcover?

Yet another attempt to convince myself that AtWQ is primarily a book-blog. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson I had been curious about this book even before it got a controversial nod from the Lit-Blog Co-op, but that selection helped push me over the edge. Atkinson's 'literary mystery' revolves around sad-sack Cambridge PI Jackson Brodie, retained to solve three unsolvable mysteries: the 30-year-old disappearance of a little girl from her own back yard, the senseless murder of a teenager, and the current whereabouts of the runaway daughter of an axe-murderess. Frankly, I think the folks at the LBC could have done better--there's no question that Case Histories is well-written and engaging, but ultimately it is an underperforming little book, and for all its aspirations to the contrary, not great literature. In fact, there's something almost desperately snobbish about the novel, a sensation that creeps through Atkinson's admittedly lovely and lucid prose--'L...

It's easy to complain about the Booker award. We could talk about Ian McEwan--awarded for the muddled and aimless Amsterdam but ignored for genuine masterpieces like Enduring Love or Atonement . Or, we might mention Life of Pi-- memo to Booker judges: a YA boys' adventure with a neat and thought-provoking twist at its end is still a YA boys' adventure, and, however well-written, not deserving of a major award. Or The Blind Assassin . Or The Handmaid's Tale . In other words, when I turned the first page of Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty , last year's winner, I was perfectly prepared, eager even, to despise it. Last year's Booker race was famously considered to be over as soon as the longlist was announced. Pundits and bookmakers alike were handing the award to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas . As it was and still is one of the finest, best-written, and most thought-provoking books I had ever read, I was overjoyed to see it recognized by an estab...