Tag Archives: Cloud Atlas

December 14, 2012 · 9:33 pm

Some Facts About My Reading Habits

It’s that time of year for Best Of lists, some which I’ll be doing later this month. The ones that always cause me anxiety are the book lists, because they force me to admit that I will never, no matter how hard I try, read all of the things worthy of being read. It’s some nerd version of FOMO, I think, and it makes me hyperventilate with literary desire.

This is not going to read a list of the best things I read this year, but for what it’s worth, my favorites were The Art of Fielding (Chad Harbach), Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell), The Tiger’s Wife (Tea Obreht), The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (Alison Bechdel), and Drown (Junot Diaz). Obviously, most of these weren’t even written this year, that’s how much I can’t keep up.

Instead of a straight-up list, I’d like to take the opportunity to turn a critical, data-driven eye on my own reading habits (woooo! data!) Who do I read? Who don’t I read? We could get real specific, but here’s how it breaks down in broad categories for my thus-far-in-2012 reading list:

Gender Books

Race Books

A few other notes:

15% of the authors I read this year are openly queer

48% are under 50, 44% are over 50, 8% are dead

23% were not born in the United States

Perhaps most surprising to me, 55% of what I read this year was non-fiction, with about half of that being straight-up memoir. Who’d have thought?

The point of anything like this (whether it’s analyzing women in the boardroom data or percentage of black women on television) is not to just through some charts up and be all “BOOM! DATA!” The point is take a closer look at our sources of information. For me, much of my perspective on the world comes from what I read (both on and off the internet). If everything I read is white and straight, well, I think it’s safe to say I’m limiting myself.

That said, I’m pretty happy with this, though perhaps the non-white section of my reading list could be beefed up a bit. That’s a sourcing problem as much as anything else, right? Where do I get my recommendations? Book blogs (mostly by white people), my bookish friends (most of whom are white), and book reviews (mostly by white reporters about white authors). So…. who’s got some recommendations for me?

Related Post: The Vida Method of analyzing gender bias in the media

Related Post: On opportunity equality vs. outcome equality

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November 5, 2012 · 9:24 pm

Don’t go see Cloud Atlas

You know what’s the worst (besides global warming, poverty, rape jokes, and Mitt Romney)? When Hollywood ruins a book you love, pulverizing whatever is subtle and delicate about it into a pulpy, preachy mess.

I loved Cloud Atlas. It wasn’t a perfect book, a desert-island book, or a book that I will pass on to my children, but it was a book that I loved for the few weeks I spent burrowing up in its six nested stories. It was complicated, and it asked me, the reader, to do some serious work. I’m a fan of a good YA novel every now and then, something to blow through to distract myself from mundane shit like the future of our country, but I like a book that doesn’t just deliver the goods with a 7th-grade vocabulary.

Cloud Atlas is an adult book about, not to be dramatic or anything, the very essence of humanity. Where the book gives you patterns and correlating stories and lets you come to your own conclusions about that essence of humanity, the movie voices-over the most simplistic, dumbed-down platitudes. God forbid you leave theater not knowing that, dramatic pause, we’re all connected.

Forget big picture, the Wachowskis missed the mark logistically, too. The novel unfolds with the six stories in a simple A,B,C,D,E,F,F,E,D,C,B,A pattern, beginning and ending with the same characters. The movie, on the other hand, ricochets every nine seconds. Before you’ve had a chance to reacclimate, they’ve moved on. Similarly, in an effort to maintain continuity they cast the same actors over and over again for each segment. Imagine Halle Berry in white face and green contact lenses as a 1930s Jew, or Jim Sturgess with artificially created slanted eyes to make him look Korean. Yeah, not good.

Oh, and did I mention it’s over three hours? Yeah, you can read half the book in that amount of time! Do it, I promise, you’ll be better off.

Related Post: Why I like YA books.

Related Post: Caitlin Moran’s How to be a Woman.

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April 19, 2012 · 2:39 am

Rise and Fall

If you want to know what you’re getting into when you choose a David Mitchell novel, commit three minutes to reading this interview first:

 ”I learned that language is to the human experience what spectography is to light: Every word holds a tiny infinity of nuances, a genealogy, a social set of possible users, and that although a writer must sometimes pretend to use language lightly, he should never actually do so — the stuff is near sacred.”

Swoon. I finished Cloud Atlas, that epic boomerang of a book, or, as Mitchell described it, “a row of ever-bigger fish eating the one in front” and I highly recommend it. Its major themes are power imbalances, the overreaches of authoritative bodies, the inevitable consequences of our technological dependence, and some variation of our “gimme gimme gimme” culture.

And of course there are some awesome structural elements, like a futuristic gossip rag-style interview between an archivist and a clone (called a “fabricant”) on death row, and a fictional dialect of a post-apocalyptic Hawaiian colony. I’m making it sound uber-cray, which it is, but just trust me that it all fits together.

You know what else it fits with? This amazing Hans Rosling video mapping the rise and fall of… well, the world. Rosling maps health and wealth of 200 countries over the last two centuries. Watch South Africa get richer and sicker due to the AIDS epidemic, watch the decimation of two world wars, and watch Japan join the early winners in the global domination game.

In Hans Rosling’s map, there is hope for improvement. The giant blue arrow framing the end of his presentation is indicative that slowly, unequally, and hestitantly, we are collectively moving towards a better future.

In Mitchell’s book, we begin on a primitive, ill, South Pacific island struggling to climb out from under violent oppressors. We climb all the way through the present into a future, on another tropical island, that is as sick and struggling and violent as ever. At least it’s fiction?

Related Post: Hans Rosling on the importance of washing machines.

Related Post: I had an English teacher who taught me the value of each and every word.

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April 4, 2012 · 12:05 am

When You Turn the Last Page

When was the last time you were head over heels in love with a book? Most recently for me, Game of Thrones had me in its thrall for a solid two months (come on! It’s 5,000 pages!), and before that, I couldn’t put down Mary Karr’s Lit.

The one and only time I’ve ever purchased an actual porn DVD–I promise, this is related–it was because the Fleshbot reviewer wrote this (link NSFW):

“When I read the seventh Harry Potter book, I was so excited I immediately called my then-boyfriend and forced him to listen to me recite the entire plot from memory. (I realize now that that was more than a little crazy.) That’s how I feel about this movie. I want to call everyone I know and tell them every single thing that happened in every scene, from interview to orgasm. It’s that good.”

So I bought it. Did I like it? Yes, but this is not a post about porn. This is a post about that kind of mania the reviewer describes, where you try to relive the joy of a particular book by forcing everyone you know to love it too. There’s the initial pleasure of reading it yourself, and then after the experience is over, there are all the weird, vicarious ways you try to get at that initial sensation.

I read reviews of books after I turn the last page. I read all those pages of praise that publishers stack at the beginning. Sometimes, I go back and read the first few pages again just to remember how it all started. I read interviews with the author to see what layers I can add to the experience. Sometimes, I draw crazy maps of the characters. And sometimes, depending on the book, I make the people I love listen to me talk about it for aaaaaages. They are very nice people, and only rarely tell me to shut up.

I’m halfway through David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and I’m in the moony-eyed, swooning, delirious phase of infatuation. I pull my face out of it when I get off the train, and it’s like a cartoon fade-away as Mitchell’s world recedes and the train platform comes into focus.

The book is built like a boomerang though time, or so says the book jacket. It begins in 1850, rockets through six separate stories related by the thinnest of narrative threads, peaks well in the future, and then ricochets backwards through the same six stories in reverse order. Each chapter is so uniquely intricate and wholly realized, I would happily read six separate novels.

Related Post: How to keep your daughter from becoming Bella.

Related Post: Tigers and Grandparents.

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