clouded

Have just finished reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which young d@vid lent me, ooh, months ago... Am v. impressed. Devoured the whole thing yesterday, recking not the resulting guilt at not working plus sore butt from being curled up on the sofa all day. The book is made up of a series of apparently disconnected narratives of wildly different types - everything from a 19th century travel diary to a dystopian consumerist future - which are linked only by the fact that someone in each narrative is reading one of the others. Ah, you think. Clever, but not that coherent. Until, halfway through, you suddenly realise that, in fact, these wildly different stories are completely thematically linked. The point they're making is one very close to my own philosophical heart: that human nature, taken as an average, is overwhelmingly self-serving and thus self-destructive in the long term, and that culture and civilisation, in their current track, are doomed. Consumerism, colonisation, power, greed - amazing how he can make the same point whether writing thriller-style about contemporary corporate cover-ups or in letter form chronicling the struggles of a brilliant but unstable classical musician in the 30s. Am v, v. impressed. Am possibly in love, actually. Must... find... more... David... Mitchell. (Oh, and A.S. Byatt likes him. He may be god). Also, memo to self: try to read more Booker shortlist books. Was also blown away by, for example, Life of Pi.

Am trying to struggle through updating my conclusion chapter today, which is tricky, because (a) I have a headache, and (b) re-reading it (the chapter, not the headache), it looks like a load of bollocks, patently written in a hurry by, for example, a desperate grad student desperate to grad. I'm hoping this is the headache talking. Shall blast it with drugs and try again.