Summer Reading

Melissa, you have inspired a list:

Bangkok Tattoo- John Burdett

The Historian- Elizabeth Kostova

The Dead Father -Donald Bartholme

Anna Karenina- I'll take another stab at it for Jolene's sake, she loved, loved it

Cloud Atlas- David Mitchel

DAVID KIPEN, book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (Random House Trade Paperbacks)
For as long as I've been reviewing books professionally, I don't believe I have ever loved a new book the way that I love Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Cloud Atlas is actually structured like six short novels nested inside of each other to form a chevron. You read half of each, then the only undivided one, and then Mitchell returns to each of his five cliffhangers in reverse order -- exactly as if you were reading, not six books in one, but six books chevroned inside each other.

Behind all the brilliant structural cantilevering is a writer blessed with a ventriloquist's perfect ear, a prodigiously sneaky gift for black comedy, a full-throated disgust at the hash mankind is making of the world, and the one thing you never find in the same package as all those other virtues: plot. David Mitchell can plot like a house afire, which coincidentally may be just what he sees when he looks at the planet -- a house afire.

As a more personal note:
Bonnie is reading "Middle sex" and really liking it, enjoy discovering Detroit in it's heyday
Seth is reading "I know why the caged bird sings" and didn't know the name of it, should've bet him money, "just little kids hanging out," he says. I can't let him read it out loud, I know they don't stay little innocent kids long enough.