Tag: David Mitchell
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Now’s a Good Time for a Dystopia
Today’s reading list features that stalwart genre of anxious times: the dystopia. I’ve tried to collect some newer and more unusual examples for this list, rather than the old standards that you see on every list. Not only are these novels prime escapist fare, but they serve as a helpful reminder that things could always…
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Favorite Books of the 2010s: The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
This is a series of reviews of my favorite books published between 2010 and 2019. The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell (2014) Mitchell’s latest novel is a genre-bending epic spanning sixty years about the people whose fates are altered by an ongoing war between immortals. The story begins in 1984 England as fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes is…
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Favorite Books of the 2010s: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
This is a series of reviews of my favorite books published between 2010 and 2019. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (2010) Jacob de Zoet is a trader with the Dutch East India Company who has come to the trading post Dejima, in the harbor of Nagasaki, Japan, in the eighteenth century.…
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Recommended: Slade House by David Mitchell
A new recommended read: Slade House by David Mitchell. Every nine years on the last Saturday in October, a mysterious iron door appears in the wall of Slade Alley. If you open it–and you should hope you don’t–you’ll find yourself in an impossible garden looking at the back of Slade House, at a place where it absolutely…
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Favorite Reads of 2014
I was going to do a whole “year in reading” post, but I got sucked into other things and now I find the year has already turned over. Happy new year! Here are my favorite reads of last year. Many are relatively new, some are classics, all are worth your time. The Sundial by Shirley…
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Recommended Reading: The Bone Clocks
Today I am recommending The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell. Mitchell’s latest novel is a genre-bending epic spanning sixty years, about the people whose fates are altered by an ongoing war between immortals. This one is going to make a lot of “Best of 2014” lists. The book grew on me a lot after I was done reading it. I…
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Cli-Fi: Fiction about climate change
I have just discovered a new genre: cli-fi, or climate change fiction. Set in the present or near future, these novels imagine a changed world once the effects of climate change are really beginning to be felt. It’s not such a new genre to me, after all. I read David Brin’s Earth and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs…