I’ve just finished this book, and it certainly soars to levels far above anything else I’ve read lately. It has a wonderful central message, which is continually revisited and all brought together nicely at the end, and the quality and style of the language over hundreds of years is spot-on.

The book is essentially constructed of six smaller books, each interrupted at a crucial moment in their story – one even midsentence – and returned to again later. The story spans from the 1800s right through to a distant future, with each of the different small books being about a different time period, and written in the style of that time period. Because of this, the book could have been enormously gimicky, and been very poorly written, but it wasn’t. Mictchell clearly has the amazing talent required to construct such a story of such amazing ambition, and to transcend both styles and genres.

Whilst this is a marvellous book in itself, it reminded me of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller in several respects, especially since both are essentially collections of stories-within-stories. However, whilst Traveller was an excellent novel, Cloud Atlas is far more accessible, and much more of a populist novel that one can just sit down, read, and enjoy, whilst still maintaining a number of worthy themes and messages. This is accessible literature, but not a trashy Dan Brown airport read.

Cloud Atlas is a very clever novel; in fact, it is so clever that you end up forgetting just how clever it is, and just run along with the story. There aren’t many writers about who can achieve this delicate balance of being smart whilst resisting the temptation to show off and overshadow their own story. That said, I found the first 100 pages or so quite hard going, as I tried to get used to the format of being cut-off mid-flow with no immediate explanation, and leaping from Dan Brown to 19th century America is a fair leap. Still, once you get into this book, you won’t come out until you’ve finished.

I highly recommend this book, and if you haven’t already got a copy, I suggest you get hold of one (and there’s no better way of doing that than by using the new-style Amazon link to the right) and start reading, because you won’t be able to stop.

This is another deeply predictable book by Dan Brown. At least when I read The Da Vinci Code the plot seemed original. Unfortunately, this time it didn’t. These two books have virtually identical plots, just using people in place of objects. You could see the ‘surprising’ ending a mile off, and some passages were extremely frustrating to read.

Let me provide you with an example…

‘My father could argue two sides of a Mobius Strip.’

Quite funny, a fairly astute and witty comment.

Langdon laughed, picturing the artful crafting of a Mobius Strip

A little flowery, what with all the ‘artful crafting’ poop. It’s hardly difficult to ‘craft’ a Mobius strip, school kids across the globe do it regularly.

a twisted ring of paper, which technically possessed only one side.

Yes, we know what a Mobius strip is. You’d have to be pretty slow not to know. And I particularly like the italics, just to emphasise what an amazing point he’s making.

Langdon has first seen the single-sided shape in the artwork of M. C. Escher.

No, Langdon would first have seen it when he was in short pants at school.

Why does Mr Brown insist on making a meal of the smallest points? He does a similar thing later on, taking two paragraphs to explain what a relief is (the artform, that is, not the relief you get when reaching the end of one of these tedious passages) – eventually explaining it in terms of the picture on the back of a penny.

One point at which I actually laughed out loud was this:

Glick’s first monthly review had come back filled with superlatives – resourceful, sharp, dependable.

If it was so filled with superlatives, why is it that the author cannot list even one. Or doesn’t he know what a superlative is?

The storyline is good, and it’s an entertaining book, but don’t expect anything deep and meaningful (and try not to cringe when he tries to include philosphical comments) and try not to get too frustrated with some of the more tedious, unnecessary explanations.

This was a faintly bizarre book, that wasn’t particularly good, but nor was it particularly bad.

Airframe is advertised as a thriller, but there were only about three short passage that could be classed as even vaguely ‘thrilling’, and they played only the most minor of roles in the plot as a whole. It was really nothing more than a particularly stressful week in the life of a woman who works for an aircraft company, with little bits and bobs about the life of a journalist thrown in here and there.

There really is nothing in particular to recommend about this book, but it’s so bland that there’s nothing particularly in there to criticise either.

Overall, I’d say that this was a relatively enjoyable but ultimately worthless read, which I wouldn’t especially recommend. I wouldn’t say that it was a book to particularly avoid either, though.

Having said all that, if you do decide to buy it, you can get a very competitive price using the link on the right.

I just finished reading this a couple of days ago. It was a fairly enjoyable book, but it certainly wasn’t as fantastic as some of the newspaper reviews would have you believe. There were parts that stretched believability to new lengths, and the whole thing was fairly predictable. Having said that, the mix of fact, superstition, legend, and fiction works surprisingly well, and I did learn a thing or two about art from reading this book. It was just disappointing that the author felt the need to leave so many clues as to the ending that it was hard not to guess.

It is something of a formulaic bestseller, a sentiment beautifully expressed by Mark Lawson:

Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, 450 pages of irritatingly gripping tosh…

It’s certainly worth reading, but don’t expect a masterpiece.

I read the ebook version, since most of the books I read now are in that format. It’s one of the many uses of my Pocket PC. But you can buy the paperback from Amazon.co.uk by clicking on the graphic above.

And if you want to join the sjhoward.co.uk book club (!), or basically just read the same books as me, I’m currently working my way through Shooting History: A Personal Journey by Jon Snow, The Guardian Year 2004 edited by Martin Woollacott, and The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (which is an absolute bargain).