Spare your time and read Cloud Atlas

This was such a waste of time and boring as hell. As I barely made it through the first story in the book about a guy who sets off to make a living in the New World and has a blackout near a tree, I get immediately pushed into the future where people are making a music video with piano music behind it. The video cuts off into a dissonant set of chords near the same tree. And then pushed another 200 years more in the future where people have colonies on the moon..

My head was spinning. None of the stories seem to be connected at first by anything other than the tree and the time warp that seems to happen near it.

Then, I thought maybe the book was about colonies? Like when at the start of the book, the guy decides to complain about his English family living off the colony of India – the same way he moves to the States and lives off trades with the Indians.

This is a moment, he realizes, when he could express his views on colonization to people on the other side of the equation, so to speak, but he can’t think of anything to say that doesn’t sound absurd under the circumstances—if he tells them he believes colonization to be abhorrent, surely the logical next question will be Then what are you doing here?—so he says nothing further, and then they’re behind him and the moment has passed.

Maybe the colonies on the moon are just something new that people devised to profit off the less fortunate?

I don’t know what the purpose of the book was.. Maybe it was just twisted science fiction.

My personal belief is that we turn to postapocalyptic fiction not because we’re drawn to disaster, per se, but because we’re drawn to what we imagine might come next. We long secretly for a world with less technology in it.

There’s no real character development, just musings upon musings on music and how it transcendes space and time.

Another negative (for me at least) was the Pandemic references. It was boring in 2020 and it was also boring in 2200 when the zoom meetings became holograms. Not great – and one of the reasons I also disliked Stephen King’s latest and greatest Holly.