I just finished David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. I spent the first two hundred pages being excited about how imaginative he was with the structure (which shifts from a diary to a collection of letters to a film treatment to a kind of confessional to an oral history, each section completely different in tone yet somehow held together thematically).

At one point, though, it turns into what I consider science fiction -- a genre I know very little about. I think I've only read one Carl Sagan (and only because it was the basis for a Jodie Foster movie). I tried to describe the Cloud Atlas plot to Drew and he gave me an eyeroll, so I'm not going to try it again here. The second half of the book is crammed full of ideas (or so it seemed -- maybe the ideas in the first half were obscured by Mitchell's writing style and I'd just tired of his writing by page 300) and so it became a little less fun.

I have a feeling, though, that it's one of those books that's gong to stick with me for a while. Maybe it's too soon for me to try writing about it.

Now I'm reading the second book in Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

On page three, Proust is describing a character who was a bit of a boob in the first book but who has since become an internationally famous physician:

"In youth, everyone... had mercilessly mocked him for his hesitant air, his excessive diffidence and affability. Did some kind friend suggest he adopt an icy demeanor? The eminence of his position certainly made it easy for him to comply.... [H]e now made a show of being cold and taciturn; when speech was required, he was brusque and made a point of saying unpleasant things. He first tried his new manner on patients who had no prior acquaintance with him, who could therefore make no comparisons, and who would have been amazed to learn that he was not a man to whom such abruptness came naturally."

Excellent. I can't wait to try that out.