DNF @ 20%.

Give me Blade Runner, give me The Matrix, ... even give me Vanilla Sky, ... but not  hundreds of pages of pretentious writing and a plot that I cannot muster any enthusiasm for.

Post-rain sweat and grime regunge Tokyo. The puddles are steaming dry in the magnified heat. A busker sings so off key that passers-by have a moral responsibility to steal his change and smash his guitar on his head. I head back towards Shinjuku submarine station. The crowds march out of step, beaten senseless by the heat. My father’s doorbell is lost at an unknown grid reference in my Tokyo street guide. A tiny nugget of earwax deep inside my ear where I can’t dig it out is driving me crazy. 

10% in, I am not sure that this one will be a winner. It's certainly nowhere near as intriguing as Cloud Atlas. 10% in and I have strong feeling that I know where this is going.

And I am already getting tired of the writing.

Everything that happens has consequences in the future and one weekend for a 15-year old teenager after a fight with her mother has unexpected consequences throughout the rest of her life.  The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell follows the life Holly Sykes through her own eyes and those four other characters during 60 years of her life.

The book begins with a 15-year old Holly Sykes leaving home after a fight with her mother, only to have a life altering weekend for herself involving a trip to a paranormal world that she forgets and her family as her younger brother disappears.  The book ends with a 74-year old Holly taking care of and wondering about the future of her granddaughter and foster son as climate change and resource depletion are sending the world towards a new dark age, though a surprising return of an old acquitance results in them having a future.  Between these two segments we follow the lives of an amoral political student Hugo Lamb, Holly’s husband Ed, author Crispin Hershey, and Marinus who is both a new and old acquaintance of Holly’s for a period of time in which they interact with Holly during different periods of her life that at first seem random but as the narrative progresses interconnect with one another in surprising ways including glimpses into a centuries long supernatural war in which Holly was directly involved in twice.

From beginning to end, Mitchell created a page-turner in which the reader did not know what to expect.  The blending of fiction and fantasy from the beginning then science fiction as the story went beyond 2014 (year of publication) as the narrative continued was expertly done.  The use of first-person point-of-views were well done as was the surprise that the book wasn’t all through Holly’s point-of-view but switched with each of the six segments of the book giving the reader a mosaic view of Holly’s life.  The introduction and slow filling in of the fantasy elements of the story were well done so when it really became the focus of the book in its fifth segment the reader was ready for it.  On top of that the layers of worldbuilding throughout the book were amazing, as characters from one person’s point-of-view had random interactions with someone in another and so on.  If there was one letdown it was the science fiction, nearly dystopian, elements of 2043 in which the political-economic setting seems farfetched—namely China who would be in trouble if there is an energy crisis and thus not dominate economically as portrayed in the book—that made the denouement land with a thud.

I had no idea what to expect from The Bone Clocks and frankly David Mitchell impressed me a lot, save for the final 10% of the book.  The blending of straight fiction, fantasy, and science fiction was amazing throughout the narrative and the numerous layers of worldbuilding, plot, and slowly evolving of the mostly unseen supernatural war that was instrumental to main points of the narrative.  If a friend were to ask me about this book I would highly recommend it to them.

Wow!  This was a pretty creepy and twisted tale.  This book was beautifully written and very interesting.  The whole time I read it, Hotel California was playing on a loop inside my head.

But what to say about it?  It's kinda of the age-old tale of a man being too stupid or stubborn--or both-- to listen to the woman in his life.  If Jonah had just listened to his sister Nora, things could have turned out so, so differently for both of them.

This is basically a Hotel California type situation.  A person with the right type of...psychic energy I guess, is lured into Slade House by the Grayer siblings, where they are treated to all sorts of fantasies--or hallucinations--and once they succumb, they are never seen again.  But each victim is warned by the previous victim until finally one of them is strong enough to fight back, which is the beginning of the end for the Slade House.

It was pretty spooky and kind of sad.  Enough of he victims' backgrounds were revealed that you felt real sympathy for most of them.  Anger, even, at siblings for what they were doing to innocent people.  It was a very good series of interconnected vignettes and while it wasn't completely an 'open ending', I feel like there is a door left open for a sequel.  I'd be very interested in reading.

This is a big bag of bizarre.  Can't wait to see where it's going.