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Since I haven't been keeping up on this recently, here's what I've read in the past couple of months:

Brooklyn Follies - Paul Auster
The follies described here are actually the big mistakes people make in their life that send them down the wrong path. Bad marriage, bad business deals, choosing a life of drugs and pornogaphy and then rectifying it with a life of religious fundamentalism. Auster's Brooklynites ask for your support as they try to persevere in their trying times unfortunately none of them are intriguing enough to gain mine.

See No Evil - Robert Baer
For CIA agent, Robert Baer, describes as much of his career as he's allowed to tell in this memoir that covers his entry into the agency in the late 60s to his disillusion in the late 90s. Anything that's classified is marked with an "X", which sounds kind of funny when it is spoken frequently in the audiobook. Baer is an expert on the middle east and becomes obsessed with finding out who is behind an assasination of a CIA agent in Beirut in the 1980s as well as several terrorist attacks during that era. He finds that doing his job becomes harder and harder as political interference from the White House and corporate interests grows over time turing the CIA into a gutless and fangless organization. The book is a little hard to follow at some points as Baer tells the details of several missions over the years that involve various characters that can hard to keep track of. The book gets most interesting towards the end when his run-ins with Clinton national security advisor Tony Lake, Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, and the Exxon Corporation forever alter his outlook on his job and his nation.

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
One of the most unique books I've read in years, Mitchell tells six different stories that you eventually realize are part of one story, but nested within each other like a Russian doll. The story begins in the 19th century on the Pacific Rim told through the journal entries of an American named Adam Ewing. Suddenly Ewing's story ends literally in mid-sentence and the story jumps ahead to Europe in the 1920s and becomes a ranchy comedy of adultery involving an aspiring composer named Robert Frobisher who comes to live and study with a more established composer. Frobisher's story is told through his letters to his lover Rufus Sixsmith and at one point in his story he comes across the ratty old journal of Adam Ewing which he finds abruptly ends mid-sentence. In the next chapter we move to the 1970s and into a very 1970s style thriller where Rufus Sixsmith is met by a reporter named Luisa Rey who is looking to write about a coverup at a nuclear power plant that Sixsmith is a consultant for. Next is present time London and a comedy of misunderstandings as Timothy Cavendish, a book publisher, gets involved with some tough characters and finds himself checked into a nursing home that he can't escape from. Then we move into the future, as an imprisoned clone tells her story of revolution in a corpocracy-run Korea. Finally, we are in the far future and back to the Pacific Rim with the story of Zachary, a Hawaiian native who meets Meronym, the strange "Prescient" who comes to study his people.

Each story is told in a different style and the connections between them all can be incredibly subtle. It's a dense book that at times is not easy to read. I'll admit I skipped the first chapter, finding it unreadable, only to come back to it at the end after I knew a little more of where this was all going. It's quite amazing how Mitchell can pull off authentic sounding 19th century writing, modern comedy, as well as an invented language of the future. The appeal of the book may be more in technique than actual plot but I found both to be pretty incredible.

Posted at April 23, 2006 10:06 AM