Book I Read in September

The next four books I plan on reading/re-reading are all coming out as movies in the next few months, and I want to read all the books first!  Want to join me?  They will be:  Cloud Atlas, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Les Miserables, and The Great Gatsby.

This month, I only finished one of them, but it was a tremendous, dense, complicated one, to say the least.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Scott read this one first and has been begging me to read it for the last year, and I finally did!  There doesn't seem to be a whole lot you can say about this book without simply giving up the intricacies that unfold as you make your way through the book, but I'll do my best:  Cloud Atlas is a set of six stories - completely different eras, settings, and characters - that are connected only by very (seemingly) thin threads.  As you read each section of the book, written brilliantly in completely and totally unique voices and styles, you get caught up in each of the individual plots, and then begin discovering connections between them all.  I truthfully didn't really know if I liked this book or not until I was well over halfway through, at which point I found myself thinking about it constantly when I wasn't reading it (always a good sign!).  The film comes out on October 26th, and critics and audiences have been having mostly really strong reactions - either loving it or hating it.  We're hoping to love it!  There is an incredibly epic, over-five-minute long trailer out there, but I think it gives a little bit too much away, so I'll leave you with this regular-sized trailer instead.