Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Let Down…But Not Disappointed?

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

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Have you ever read a book that was super hyped and thought it was…good but not as good as advertised? And you weren’t disappointed you read it but it still didn’t match the exaltations from others? Cloud Atlas is such a book for me. I appreciated what it was trying to do; I definitely got the 2666 vibes and 2666 is one of my favorite books of all-time so that’s a good thing. I like how it looked at the scope of history and the human experience. I like the […]

Deep Cuts

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

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Utopia Avenue comes into Dean Moss’s life at just the right time. He’s broke and newly homeless when Levon Frankland approached him at a bar and offers him a job. Levon needs a bassist for a rock group that he’s putting together. Dean’s so desperate he joins in despite the fact that there’s no one else in the band. Soon he’s joined by Pete “Griff” Griffin on drums, Elizabeth “Elf” Holloway on vocals and piano, and Jasper de Zoet on lead guitar. They are four […]

A Novel of the First Rank

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

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Around the turn of the 19th century, Dutch clerk Jacob de Zoet agrees to take a post with the Dutch East India Company with the trading port of Dejima near Nagasaki, Japan. He hopes that during his five year stint he can amass a fortune enough to impress his beloved’s father and get him to allow the marriage. A humble, pious man, de Zoet is a terrible fit for the society on Dejima, where corruption and dishonesty are the rule. Jacob struggles to get along […]

lovely, stinking, brutal, sunburned, magical, and filthy.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

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Jacob de Zoet is a young man of meager means. He has hitched his hopes to the Dust East India Company- he’ll spend several trading seasons on Dejima- about as far away from home and his fiancée as he can physically be. What is Dejima? Why, I’m glad you asked! The year is 1799, and Japan is very strict in regards to foreign interference and influence. Following disasters interactions with the Spanish and Portuguese decades earlier, Japan is a closed empire. Dejima, a man-made island […]

And everything is rocking out of control/When we hit Japan

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

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I don’t even know where to start with this one. Historical fiction tends to be a pretty dense read, and David Mitchell tends to write pretty dense books, and my mind is swirling after finishing The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. First, let me say that this book could have really used a good Cast of Characters page or two. Broken into three main sections (followed by two more epilogue-y sections), each is full of secondary and tertiary characters who are introduced once, disappear […]

If you like David Mitchell, you’ll probably like it.

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

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Hello! I love David Mitchell. Sometimes I don’t understand David Mitchell. Recently I learned he’s only 52, i.e., a couple of months *younger* than me, and so much younger than he was in my head, and was all, “You bastard!” But what has any of that to do with The Bone Clocks? Why, nothing at all! The Bone Clocks is somewhat similar in structure to Cloud Atlas, though not as complicated…structurally. It’s plenty complicated. There are immortals among us! There are good immortals and bad […]



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