What I'm reading ...

I have started Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. This is my next book club selection, which we chose for various reasons. Apart from it being a well known and popular book, the author is from the area in which I live and the movie will come out soon. It is quite a big book and seems to be a challenging read, but I will give it a go. Here is the blurb:

A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific Ocean in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in Belgium between the First and Second World Wars; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; the testament of a genetically modified ‘dinery server’ on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation – the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other’s echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small.

What Alice Forgot - by Liane Moriarty

What a good read! Although this was quite a sizable book, because I was reading it on my Kindle, I did not notice and kept turning the pages. Alice's memory loss is used as a vehicle for her to examine her own feelings and, eventually, to look back on the past decade with fresh eyes. There is a lot of careful detail, which, for me at least, gave credibility. For example, her early flashes of recall were triggered by smells; in my experience, smell is a very strong stimulant to emotion and memory.

The story is largely told from her perspective, but with two other streams: her sister's journal and her grandmother's blog. This works well. The book as a whole is like a jigsaw, where the reader is gradually guided to insert all the pieces. Right up until the end, it was not obvious what the final outcome would be.