Decline and the Fall

For the next few weeks I am going to be reading The Decline and the Fall. I think at this point in my life, I should concentrate on the great books I have never read like Ulysses, Anatomy of Melancholy and Histories.

The Wise Man's Fear- Patrick Rothfuss

Boy, does Pat Rothfuss know how to spin a tale? If the third one is as good as this one, I am almost not going to mind waiting for a long time. This one is much, much more mature than "The Name of the Wind", as is Kvothe. The storytelling is not pathbreaking by any stretch of imagination, but the way the Author tells the story is fantastic. Yes, the book is too long and doesn't work like a novel and leap forward in resolving the book's central crisis, but you hardly notice these small quibbles, when you are rush headlong in the flow of the story. In fact, for over a week, I couldn't think of anything else but the book. Now, it's time for a headlong dive in to "The Crippled god"

Cloud Atlas- David Mitchell

Cloud Atlas is not a dumb book. It has internalized the tropes of various genres and does a great job of miming each genre, from the paperback thriller to the science fiction novelette and the post apocalyptic fantasy.The novel is constantly engaging and sweeps up the reader with each shift in tone.You can almost feel it when the author shifts gears to a new genre.However, the juggling of genres and their interlinking, while being mildly interesting and competently executed, is only superficially clever. The book does not aim to, nor does it acheve the sublime brilliance of a true literary masterpiece. To em the only path breaking thing about the novel was the genre bending narrative, which many others have done better than the author. Again, the individual stories themselves are nothing remarkable. Like, I said, the idea seems to be to use the standard genre tropes and expect the whole to to lift the mundane sumof parts to the level of brilliance. But, it never quite seems to take off
Ultimately, although the book is not a bad read, it remains just that, when it could have been so much more