Book Review: Cloud Atlas versus The Bone Clocks

It's been a while since I've written about books. Mainly because I have been so busy recently, that I haven't had nearly as much time to read as I'd have liked to. As our house is very small, I've been very good in the last few years of not buying books, but borrowing them from my local library instead. This has lead to me reading a wide variety of books (some terrible, some gripping, some just a bit meh) which I probably wouldn't have ever bought.

When I was travelling in Argentina, back in 2010, I was staying in a hostel in Ushuaia, in Patagonia in Argentina.

I'd finished the book I was reading, and the only English book in the hostel book exchange, was David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. I did a quick skim of the inside (my usual test for whether I think I'll like a book - I have to like the font and the page layout, or a book will annoy me!) and wasn't convinced. I considered getting a book in Spanish instead, but that would have taken a lot of effort, and I wanted something to enjoy reading. 

So I took it, and on a series of long distance bus journeys - the perfect time to read uninterrupted - I started reading. Well it was a struggle. I thought it was utter rubbish. I skipped a fair few chapters at the start, only to realise that they had second halves and that I was quickly going to run out of book if I continued at this rate! So I went back and struggled through most of the book but I was seriously disappointed. I don't feel like I've read a book this bad for ages. Especially one that was supposed to be good!

Over lunch at school one day, I was speaking to our school librarian (who has literally read everything!!) about what to read, and she started telling me about David Mitchell's other books, saying she really liked Black Swan Green, and recommending that I read it. 

When passing my local library the next day, I saw that they had The Bone Clocks, which I'd seen advertised on the Tube as being Mitchell's latest book, and so thought that as every other person I've ever spoken to about Cloud Atlas seemed to love it and rave about it, I should give him a second chance. 

And well....The Bone Clocks is an entirely different story. I got into it straight away, as it seemed a fairly normal story about a teenager in the 80's in England - a story I could relate much more to that the 1850's in the South Pacific. It was a while before anything unusual slipped into the story, but it was slipped in in such a way that it was just a casual injection of something a little out of the ordinary, and then gone, back to a normal story. 

I don't want to say too much about the actual plot, as I don't want to ruin it but I will say READ IT!! It was incredibly gripping. I struggled to put it down at night to go to sleep, and even tried to drunk-read it on the tube on the way home from a night out (it didn't work - I had to re-read it all the next day as I remembered nothing!)

It was so addictively written, and really made me think about what our world is going to be like in 30 years time, and what we are doing to it. 

I'm tempted to read it again before returning it to the library, but instead, I think this will be a book I will buy as I know I could read it again and again.