Allison L.’s Books You Should Have Read By Now

One of the best things about my job is getting advance readers of new and exciting fiction yet to hit the bookshelves. I’ve discovered some fantastic books this way, and I love to share them with anyone who will listen. But I also get the chance to read books that have been out longer—be it a few years or a few centuries—and they can be just as fun to talk about. This month’s pick for a book you should have read by now is Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

It’s tempting to call this a collection of six short stories/novellas–and it is–but unlike the majority of short story collections, these stories add up to something much, much greater than their sum: they make up a novel. And an exceptionally good one at that. Instead of being told in normal linear fashion, they fit inside each other like Russian nesting dolls. Each story is broken off mid-action (in one case, mid-sentence) to give us a slice of the next story, and then we go backwards. It sounds crazy, and I think that if any other author tried this, it would have crashed and burned…but David Mitchell succeeded in a way that’s just mind boggling.

A story of sailing from New Zealand to the Americas in 1850, the tribulations of an unreliable narrator in Belgium in 1931, a race to expose a nuclear plant as a ticking time bomb in the 1970s, the horrors of being forced into a modern day nursing home, a dystopian near future in which clones are used as slaves in a corporatocracy, and adventures in post-apocalyptic Hawaii. These are radically different scenarios spread generations apart, but they all speak to the same truths about human nature and the possibility of redemption, individually and as a society. And the narrators all have a lot more in common than you would think at first glance.

My personal favorite story is the one in the dystopian near-future (because who doesn’t love a society run by corporations who enslave ‘genetically inferior’ people?), but what’s amazing about this book is how Mitchell links these stories together. His incredible writing, especially the turns-of-phrase that make you pause and reflect, keeps you reading when the first novella stops mid-sentence, but as the stories begin to fit together — as the parts begin to give you a glimpse of the whole — it’s suddenly mind-boggling and amazing and impossible to put down.

I’ve read a lot of good books, some of them so good that it’s nearly impossible for me to come up with a favorite, or even five favorites, but there are only a few that approach this level of truly transcendent writing–the kind that’s so good, so immense, so personal, so beautiful, so true, it gives you chills. When’s the last time a book gave you chills?

Yes, you should have read it by now, but it’s never too late. Just come by BookPeople or click the link above and get yourself a copy of Cloud Atlas, a finalist for the 2004 Booker and Nebula award. How can you pass that up?