The Reason I Jump was written by a 13 year old Japanese boy with autism. David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green, has a son with autism, and as he explains in the forward to this book, the first thing a parent does when their child has been diagnosed with autism is, research the hell out of it. While most things written about autism come from either the parents of affected children or doctors, Mitchell stumbled across this first hand account by Naoki Higashida, and had […]
In Which I Question My Sanity
I’m going to say the words that few book lovers ever utter. I completely understand if, from this moment on, no one ever trusts my judgement again. I can’t even trust my judgement anymore. But… *deep breath* The movie was better than the book. I know, I know! Blasphemy! But the fact still remains, the Wachowski siblings and Tykwer were able to pull it off where Mitchell mostly floundered. (Not that the movie was a cinematic masterpiece, but I feel like I “got” what they […]
Black Swan Green
If you’ve never read anything by David Mitchell I highly recommend starting with Black Swan Green. Mitchell is a beautiful writer with elegant turns of phrase and vivid descriptions, even when covering a slice out of the life of a lonely-ish 13-year-old boy in the early 1980s in small town England. Jason Taylor is the youngest child of a grocery store chain manager and a bored lonely housewife growing up in the town of Black Swan Green, a town that has no greens and no […]
A fascinating labyrinth of a novel
I read Cloud Atlas two years ago and liked it but didn’t LOVE it. I thought the end didn’t quite come together the way Mitchell wanted it to. I was definitely reluctant to dive into The Bone Clocks, because it *is* a heavy book. But I’m really glad I did–I think I like this better than Cloud Atlas! It all starts when Holly Sykes runs away from home in the 1980s. She is telepathic, with the ability to “hear” people inside her mind, and her […]