The Reading Group Reads...
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
The Reading Group's August meeting was an animated two hours discussion of
this unusual book. The author writes a series of separate stories spanning the
time period from about 1800 to somewhere in the future. However, we find that
there are connections between the stories - some obvious (characters, documents
and events that reappear in subsequent stories), some not so obvious. It was
the latter which the group found absorbing to discuss, such as man's
duplicity, greed, self-destruction. David Mitchell has the ability to write in
widely different styles; one story may be like a fast-paced 1950s American
thriller, another written as a series of letters to someone in another country.
We found that there was so much to discover in this book, and the more we
talked about it, the more we unravelled.
If you enjoy reading, please come to one of our future meetings, always held on the first Wednesday of the month. We take it in turns to suggest a book. The next meeting will be on the 5th October at the Matheson's, Kent House, 9 High Street, Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, and on November 2nd, Under the Eye of the Clock at 5 Pound Close, Burwell.