November Meeting, "Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell

Forgive my lateness with this review -- the holidays and all.

Finding a nearby restaurant to fit the locales in this book proved tricky. Since some of the novel took place in Korea, our solution was to meet at Japon, a great Japanese restaurant in the Kirby area.  A little off-the-mark, I know, but at least it's Asian!

As for the book, about half the group managed to read the whole thing; a couple didn't even try. To say it was hard to read does not adequately explain the problem. Oddly, the dystopian, post-apocalyptic, sci-fi storyline wasn't the issue. Too many characters, too many time periods, too many places, too much esoterica, not enough detail, and a very long chapter written in incomprehensible dialect -- those were the problems!

The story itself is pretty catchy. Individuals who've led relatively interesting lives across the centuries are linked together in some way. There are definitely connections and coincidences that tie the characters together but sometimes they are somewhat vague. There is also supposed to be a reincarnation theme, but the only reason I know that is because it was either mentioned in the promo for the movie or I read it in a review.

What might make the story easier to follow would be a table of contents, maybe containing the characters' names and time frames. Is that too much to ask for these days? This website provides nice detail about some of these things, even if the author did use his imagination to a certain extent. My biggest gripe is that the author never says in what centuries the future chapters take place or when "The Fall" occurred. You know they're in the future, and the more distant future, but it would have been nice to have a specific context for the coming dystopia . Oddly, one of the newspaper reviews actually gave dates for the future time periods. They obviously pulled these dates out of thin air, since they were definitely not mentioned anywhere in the book. And yes, I did read the whole book and would have noted those dates in my own table of contents if they'd been given.

We chose this book because of the hype surrounding the movie's release: great cast, lots of fanfare -- check out this synopsis. Our expectation was that we'd see the movie after discussing it. That never happened! Seems it failed miserably at the box office. Maybe because it was almost 3 hours long? Or maybe because the plot was just too involved to be depicted on screen. When will Hollywood learn that not all books should be made into movies. Oh well.. we're waiting for the Netflix release so we can have our private screening.