Cloud Atlas

That brings me to my last must-read author, which is David Mitchell.

David Mitchell people might know best, um, from Cloud Atlas, which was turned into, uh, a movie I love but is not super well received, but it, a spotty little, uh, special movie.

Cloud Atlas is, I think, his most famous book.

But, um, I think the book I really wanna plug is called Slade House, 'cause it's another haunted house, does this house wanna eat you, uh, sort of story.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna read the, the book copy for you.

... they're my, my nemesis.

Okay.

Um, do you ever read Cloud Atlas?

Mm.

Are we doing Cloud Atlas? Yes, we're doing a Cloud Atlas kind of.

Mm-hmm.

So those are the categories that I, like, these, like, linked topics, uh, th- with the idea being that you r- if you read them in publication order, often the authors are in direct dialogue with previous versions or period, g- doing similar things, referencing the classic book.

Yeah

...

Cloud Atlas and other books that go along with that.

Yeah.

We are entering the territory of the top two books on this Collider list

Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem at number two, and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas claiming the number one spot

These are the heavyweights

Truly.

And speaking of rigid structure, that leads us perfectly to the number one book on this list, a novel that is entirely defined by its breathtaking, almost arrogant structural complexity

Oh, here we go

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.

If The Three-Body Problem is an epic of cosmic physics, Cloud Atlas is an epic of the human soul.

So a couple that I read this summer that I loved were Homebound by Portia Alon, which is...

I'm sure I'm not the first person to make this comparison, but it's kind of like tomorrow needs Cloud Atlas.

It's like speculative with this technology element.

It starts in the 1980s.