Challenge: 50 Books discussion

Hello everyone! I will be your (daunted) leader for our October group read of Cloud Atlas.

As Wikipedia puts it, Cloud Atlas (2004) "consists of six nested stories, whereof each is read (or observed) by a main character of the next. The first five stories are each interrupted at a pivotal moment. After the sixth story, the other five stories are closed, in reverse chronological order, and each ends with the main character reading or observing the chronologically previous work in the chain." (This reminds me of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, so I'm partially looking forward to it, and partially daunted some more!) The book won the British Book Awards Literary Fiction Award and the Richard & Judy Book of the Year award, and was nominated for the Booker Prize, Nebula Award, and Arthur C. Clarke Award, and of course was made into a movie in 2012.

Our discussion schedule will be:
Oct. 5 - 11: chapters 1-3
Oct. 12 - 18: ch. 4-6
Oct. 19 - 25: ch. 7-9
Oct. 26-31: ch. 10-11

I'll be posting discussion prompts around the beginning of each discussion week, but by all means, feel free to talk about anything about the book. Please, though, mark spoilers if you're jumping ahead of where our reading schedule is.

Whether you've read the book before or not, please consider joining us for our group read. I'd love to have a lot of discussion on this one -- I think I might need the help keeping track of what's going on! And as always, you don't need to read the exact edition shown here.

Happy reading! I can't wait to see what happens! :)

Hi Tiffany!
I'm so glad we're doing this book!


*****Possible Spoilers Ahead******



I read this book just before I the release of the movie and I hate to admit to it but I'd not heard of the author or the book before I saw the trailers.
So....
I had a few outstanding memories of this book from my last read and I was interested to see if they held true. I remember it being a really struggle to get through the first two chapters. I just found Ewing to be a bit of a boring stuffed shirt and then Forbisher was just dull. For me, Luisa Rey's story is where things really picked.
On the second read, still didn't enjoy Ewing but was taken by Frobisher's charm. He's a bit of a scoundrel! Luisa Rey is still the best of the three chapters probably because I love a good murder mystery! This time around I started to notice all the references to the other lives that Mitchell connects across the arc of the book. Some of them are obvious (the comet birthmark), some of them I had forgotten about by the time they became relevent.
The other thing I loved about this story is the change of pace, tone and style that Mitchell achieves with each of his characters. I think that was the main reason I kept reading.
Ok, that was a bit of a ramble, sorry!

Love the ramble! And that leads perfectly into our discussion for this first week!

Since, as we've already read, Cloud Atlas is made up of 6 "nested stories," I figured we'd start our Week 1 discussion with a general question: Which, of the three we've read so far, is your favorite story? Also, do the jumps between stories/time bother you?

Like Carol, I'm digging the changes in tone and style. I keep thinking how talented Mitchell is (or at least seems to me) to be able to change the tone within one book.

Ewing's journal-on-a-ship story reminded me of Melville's Typee. I loved Robert Frobisher's letters in the second story. I loved the epistolary style for the narrative, as well as Frobisher's style of writing, using musical language to describe the world around him. Towards the end (or maybe middle) of the story, I started to dislike him a bit: he is a scoundrel! He's dishonest and sleeps around, and yet I still overall liked the character, scoundrelines and all. I did wonder, though, how we were able to read the letters *he* wrote to Sixsmith, but never the letters Sixsmith wrote back to him. In the next story, of course, we find out it's because (view spoiler)[we meet Sixsmith later in his life, and he has all of the letters Frobisher wrote to him, much like the way we know about Ewing's journal is because Frobisher read it at Zedelghem. I said to myself, "Ah, now I see the nesting of the stories!" (hide spoiler)]. I also enjoyed the Luisa Rey story. At the end I gasped and actually said out loud: "Nooooo!!!" :)

I think of the three, my favorite is Frobisher's narrative. I can't wait to see where all of this goes! I'm actually having to hold myself back from reading it all so I don't get ahead of schedule for our group discussion.

Hello again! Now that -- according to our reading/discussion schedule -- we've gone through each story once, which is (currently) your favorite? What's your least favorite?

As we head in to our third week of discussion, I'm curious what others think of the Sonmi~451 / Nea So Copros story. What did you think of Mitchell's crafting of this particular world? Did you view it as a warning to today's consumer society, or just a fantasy?

Also, what did you think of all of Mitchell's plays on today's world, like calling movies "disneys," cars "fords," and having the almighty Papa Song's (McDonald's)?

Final week! Please feel free to chime in, even if you haven't up to this point!

Hopefully some of you have stuck with the book long enough to see some common themes running through the different stories. Two that I saw (that I actually accidentally read about when I was posting the Wikipedia reference for week one) were the birthmark (someone in each story has a birthmark shaped like a comet) and the number 6 (six main stories, six movements in Frobisher's musical composition...). Did you find other themes and Easter eggs in the different stories?

And to wrap up, how'd you like the book? Did you make it through? Did you give up? Were you captivated? Bored? Confused? Hated some stories?

Tiffany wrote: "Hello again! Now that -- according to our reading/discussion schedule -- we've gone through each story once, which is (currently) your favorite? What's your least favorite?"
I'm so sorry, I'm so behind with this read. So...
As a sci/fi, fantasy reader it is fairly obvious that I enjoyed Somni and Zachery's stories but I remember thinking Cavendish's tale the most fondly. However, this time around Cavendish just annoyed me! So far I find him to be just a curmudging old guy who blames everyone for his predicament except him. Now I've only back to Somni's story so I'm hoping that the second half of his story is the better half.

Tiffany wrote: "As we head in to our third week of discussion, I'm curious what others think of the Sonmi~451 / Nea So Copros story. What did you think of Mitchell's crafting of this particular world? Did you view..."
Oh I loved this story, I loved how everything is referred to by brands.
I hope people saw this story as a lesson against consumerism become too important and I really enjoyed the implication that this life style caused the Fall from Zacherys tale. I could easily see the idea of greed causing the collapse of society.

Carol wrote: "...I remember thinking Cavendish's tale the most fondly. However, this time around Cavendish just annoyed me! So far I find him to be just a curmudging old guy who blames everyone for his predicament except him. ..."

Yeah, I thought the same thing at the beginning: he didn't take responsibility for all the various aspects that were actually his fault. It wasn't his fault that he was tricked, but the financial troubles etc. were his. But then we got into the adventure part, with the escape, and I forgot about all that other stuff :)

Carol wrote: "Oh I loved this story, I loved how everything is referred to by brands. ..."

Me too :)