When writing is great, Mitchell told me of the books he loved as a reader, “your mind is nowhere else but in this world that started off in the mind of another human being. There are two miracles at work here. One, that someone thought of that world and people in the first place. And the second, that there’s this means of transmitting it. Just little ink marks on squashed wood fiber. Bloody amazing.”
That is Wyatt Mason in the Times Sunday Magazine, on experimental novelist David Mitchell.
I tore through Cloud Atlas, am looking forward to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and in the meantime have bought Number9Dream for my flight to Liberia.
2 Responses
I loved Cloud Atlas and Number9Dream, though it’s been a long time since I read them. Can’t wait for the next one from him. Being someone who also flies a lot, a good book can save me from the interminable boredom of long flights.
I’m getting caught up on Grant Morrison’s Invisibles, and . . . yeah. Exactly.