<p>Mary and MommaJ, The Road is on my list of top 10 books. In general I’m not a big McCarthy fan, but that one blew me away. I also loved Atonement. </p>
<p>My guilty pleasure is reading Neil Gaiman&Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens. In general I’m not a sci-fi/fantasy person, but this book is just filled with eccentric British humor, including an angel who has a rare book shop. It always makes me smile.</p>
<p>(And I’m fine with The Glass Room.)</p>
<p>I’m in. </p>
<p>To Kill a Mockingbird is my all time favorite book. It is the book that turned me into a reader after I read it in Jr. High.</p>
<p>Guilty Pleasures - I love books that are part of a series. My favorite being the Outlander books by Diana Gabaldon. I have read all of the Outlander books twice and a couple of them I have read 3 times. This summer my kids convinced me to read all the A Game of Thrones books and I thought they were great. I also enjoyed the Kushiel series that ignatius mentioned earlier, and I have read all the Harry Potter books.</p>
<p>BUandBC82, I read To Kill a Mockingbird aloud to each of my children when they reached about age 10. Every time, I wondered if I would like the book as much the second, third, fourth, fifth time around and I always did. It was such a pleasure to see the story new again through the eyes of a young person who knew nothing about it. Magical.</p>
<p>I have always been drawn to mysteries. My favorite author growing up was Agatha Christie (and my favorite board game was Clue). It was fun to read The Moonstone with this group.</p>
<p>It will be interesting to read * The Glass Room * after CA–it seems we’re moving from fantasy dystopia to a more realistic one.</p>
<p>MommaJ: Sometimes I italicize like NJTM:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>More often I take the shortcut: press control (Crtl) and i at the same time. Fill in the book title between the two bracketed I’s that magically appear. Press control (Crtl) and b at the same time and you have a shortcut if you want bold print and control (Crtl) u if you want to underline.</p>
<p>One lazy step … the computer does the work.</p>
<p>^Wow Ignatius, I didn’t know that. So much easier. I thought you all were painstakingly typing those brackets, etc, every single time.</p>
<p>^^^ Actually sometimes I do type in the brackets, etc. I learned the shortcut after painstakingly typing brackets for a while: my acquired knowledge and my fingers don’t always work together yet.</p>
<p>Thanks for the shortcut ignatius. I have been painstakingly typing those brackets.</p>
<p>I am experimenting with the shortcut–wow! I have been painstakingly typing those brackets, too.</p>
<p>The Glass Room is fine by me!</p>
<p>^ Great! I’ll start a new thread.</p>
<p>I’m fine with The Glass Room, too!</p>
<p>The conversation last week moved too quickly for me, but I wanted to add that I especially liked these two related comments:</p>
<p>From Mary13:
</p>
<p>And from ignatius:
</p>
<p>So I was interested to read in a review of the movie:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I read somewhere (if it was someone here, my apologies!) that one of the recurring themes of the book was how the “truth” of our own lives gets changed when someone else tells the story. After I read the post by ignatius I realized that there were a lot of other, more minor “stories” inside the main stories in the book: Henry Goose tells Adam stories about his patients, the famous conductor tells Frobisher “orchestral war stories,” Luisa tells Sixsmith and others stories about her dad (“polished with each retelling”), Cavendish “once condensed the nine-volume Story of Oral Hygiene on the Isle of Wight to a mere seven hundred pages,” Sonmi hears stories of the colonists when she is up in the hills, and Napes tells stories about his grandpa Truman climbing Mauna Koa.</p>
<p>What a terrific observation, buenavista!</p>
<p>By the way, for anyone who’s interested, I stumbled across a webpage that has a gushy review by someone who’s seen the film (they say it was a spiritual experience, and praise its “optimism’”), as well as a bunch of stills from the movie.</p>
<p>[Jim</a> Sturgess Online Forum • View topic - CLOUD ATLAS](<a href=“http://jimsturgessonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=3095&start=300]Jim”>http://jimsturgessonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=3095&start=300)</p>
<p>You have to scroll down…the gushy review, by “Nordling”, was posted on Sept 29; the link to the stills is in an Oct 4 post.</p>
<p>^Mmm…Sturgess is easy on the eyes ;)</p>
<p>Ahem. Carry on.</p>
<p>^Maybe, but Ben Whishaw is incredibly gifted as an actor, and I think he is going to be a fantastic Frobisher. :)</p>
<p>Very interesting, buenavista! I got so caught up in the main “sextet” of stories that I didn’t think about the myriad other ways that storytelling is incorporated into the novel.</p>
<p>Timothy Cavendish definitely has a tendency to go off on storytelling tangents: “Where was I? Odd how the wrong stories pop into one’s head at my age” (p. 146). Mr. D’Arnoq is also quite a storyteller. He tells “tales of ships he has supplied during his ten-year on Chatham Isle” (p. 9), and when Adam asks him about the Moriori, the result is a “Pandora’s Box of history,” with Mr. D’Arnoq’s narrative still “unbroken three hours later.” Seems like many characters have tales to tell–exactly how many are “tall tales,” we can’t be sure.</p>
<p>Buena great observations.
Interesting how time progresses, the vehicle for “passing down stories” also progresses.
As noted before ,
journals
letters
books
movies
Sonys - (Ipad- internet age and beyond)
with a return to “storytelling”,
bookended in the movie. </p>
<p>Related to your comment, Buena, this is from the link about the movie</p>
<p>**Who better, if you think about it? Mr. Tykwer, 47, a German filmmaker, is probably best known for “Run Lola Run,” a movie that doesn’t tell multiple stories, exactly, but rather the same story, with subtle variations, over and over again. The Wachowskis (she is 47; he, 44), in the “Matrix” movies,
posit that reality itself is just a story. **</p>
<p>(shout out to Ignatius, just used her easy shortcut)</p>
<p>Enjoyed everyone’s comments about variety of books. </p>
<p>Re: Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes half way through the humor dimishes proportionally as rambling, boredom increases. Off my recommend list. </p>
<p>Related to Cloud Atlas theme, and inspiration for the TITLE of Vowell’s book seems relevant-- predation
David Malo - historian from letter to native friends mid 1800s</p>
<p>*If a big wave comes in,
large and ** unfamiliar fishes ** will come from the dark ocean,</p>
<p>and when they see the small fishes of the shallows they will eat them up.
The white man’s ships have arrived with clever men from the big countries.
They know our people are few in number and out country is small,
they will ** devour** us*</p>
<p>Nice #312 post, buenavista. You’ve got me thinking about the book again. </p>
<p>I don’t think we ever talked about the title. Thinking more about the book has me wondering why Mitchell picked the title, Cloud Atlas. Atlas is a mythical character. I wondered if Mitchell was telling us right from the start that the stories inside his book are “fictional”. An atlas is also a book of maps. Perhaps the use of “Atlas” in the title is a reference to the many locations the stories take place? The “Cloud” part of the story made me think back to buenavista’s post 132 where she said “To me the whole book had the quality of a dream…” I can be sold on the dream theory.</p>
<p>I did a search trying to find out if Mitchell ever explained the title of the book and this is what I found on Wikipedia (I highlighted the title sentence) -
I am not familiar with Mitchell’s definition of “Atlas”. Any thoughts?</p>
<p>BUandBC82, that quote of Mitchell’s on Wikipedia is from a transcript of a radio interview…so he might not have been speaking very precisely. </p>
<p>I actually looked up the word “atlas” in my OED to see if there could be a meaning to the word I don’t know!</p>
<p>My guess is that Mitchell was trying to say something like “human nature is always the same, but people are always changing.” If so, he would be using the word “atlas” in a very figurative sense. When you think of an atlas, you think of something fixed, like a snapshot of the earth at a certain point in time. Clouds, on the other hand, are changing from moment to moment.</p>
<p>In other words, clouds are always clouds (people are always people) but the forms and configurations of clouds are extremely mutable (people are capable of a great deal of change, within certain parameters).</p>
<p>I just have to share something: While visiting my mom, I started talking with one of her (elderly) friends who happens to be a delight. She was telling me that although it is diffficult to get around, she has found enjoyment watching the clouds as they change shapes and using her imagination.</p>
<p>Made me smile :)</p>