I can resist everything except temptation.
I read pretty much anything with a halfway interesting title, although mostly SF and technical books about programming.
Pronouns: any
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58% complete! Attaboy has read 7 of 12 books.
Cloud Atlas Sextet holds my life, is my life, now I'm a spent firework; but at least I've been a firework.
— Cloud Atlas Hachette Essentials Edition Hachette Essentials by David Mitchell (Page 489)
Content warning suicide
Knew I'd never see my 25th birthday. Am early for once. The lovelorn, the cry-for-helpers, all mawkish tragedians who give suicide a bad name are the idiots who rush it, like amateur conductors. A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, 'Suicide is Selfishness.' Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call it a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reasons: to evade fingers of blame; to impress one's audience with one's mental fibre; to vent anger; or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it --- suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends and enemies a bit of soul-searching. The only selfishness lies in ruining strangers' days by forcing 'em to witness a grotesqueness. So I'll make a thick turban from several towels to muffle the shot and soak up the blood, and do it in the bath-tub, so it shouldn't stain any carpets. Last night I left a letter under the manager's day-office door --- he'll find it at 8 a.m. tomorrow --- informing him of the change in my existential status, so with luck an innocent chambermaid will be spared an unpleasant surprise. See, I do think of the little people. Don't let 'em say I killed myself for love, Sixsmith, that would be too ridiculous. Was infatuated by Eva Crommelynck for a blink of an eye, but we both know in our hearts who is the true love of my life.
— Cloud Atlas Hachette Essentials Edition Hachette Essentials by David Mitchell (Page 488 - 489)
"Foolproof" depends on the size of the fool.
— Cloud Atlas Hachette Essentials Edition Hachette Essentials by David Mitchell (Page 385)
After my modest victory I played patience (the card-game, not the virtue, never that) in the lounge, something I had not done since my ill-starred Tintagel honeymoon with Madame X. (The place was a dive. All crumbling council houses and joss-stick shops.) Patience's design flaws became obvious for the first time in my life: the outcome is decided not during the course of play but when the cards are shuffled before the game even begins. How pointless is that?
— Cloud Atlas Hachette Essentials Edition Hachette Essentials by David Mitchell (Page 383 - 384)
Content warning racism
'What'd I do?' says one triplet, 'if I was President? First, I'd aim to win the Cold War, not just aim not to lose it.' Another takes over. 'I wouldn't kowtow to Arabs whose ancestors parked camels on lucky patches of sand...' '...or to red gooks. I'd establish -- I'm not afraid to say it -- our country's rightful -- corporate -- empire. Because if we don't do it...' '...the Japs'll steal the march. The corporation is the future. We need to let business run the country and establish a true meritocracy.' 'Not choked by welfare, unions, "affirmative action" for amputee transvestite colored homeless arachnophobes...' 'A meritocracy of acumen. A culture that is not ashamed to acknowledge that wealth attracts power...' '...and that the wealthmakers -- us -- are rewarded. When a man aspires to power, I ask one simple question: "Does he think like a businessman?"' Luisa rolls her napkin into a compact ball. 'I ask three simple questions. How did he get that power? How is he using it? And how can it be taken off the sonofabitch?'
— Cloud Atlas Hachette Essentials Edition Hachette Essentials by David Mitchell (Page 419 - 420)
An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.
— Cloud Atlas Hachette Essentials Edition Hachette Essentials by David Mitchell (Page 344)
The downstrata can't buy the drugs necessary to counter these privations. Melanoma and malaria belts advance northwards at forty kilometers per year. Those Production Zones of Africa and Indonesia that supply Consumer Zones' demands are sixty per cent uninhabitable. Plutocracy's legitimacy, its wealth, is drying up; the Juche's Enrichment Laws are mere sticking plasters on haemorrhages and amputations. Its only other response is that strategy beloved of all bankrupt ideologues: denial. Downstrata purebloods fall into the untermensch sinks; xecs parrot Catechism Seven, 'A Soul's Value is the Dollars Therein.'
But where's the logic in allowing downstrata purebloods to die in places like Huamdonggil? What will replace their valuable labor?
Us. Fabricants cost very little to cultivate, Archivist, and have no awkward hankerings for a better, freer life. As a fabricant xpires after forty-eight hours without a highly genomed Soap whose manufacture and supply is the Corp's monopoly, 'it' will not run away.
— Cloud Atlas Hachette Essentials Edition Hachette Essentials by David Mitchell (Page 341)
The man I had known as Postgrad Hae-Joo Im, backdropped by a long-dead actor playing a character conceived a century ago, looked into my eyes and said my name. 'I am not xactly who I said I am.'
— Cloud Atlas Hachette Essentials Edition Hachette Essentials by David Mitchell (Page 245)
A diary, a series of letters, outside narrator, auto biography, an interview/interrogation. What narrative style could the next chapter have?
Archivist, time is passing. Can we segue to my final nite on campus?
— Cloud Atlas Hachette Essentials Edition Hachette Essentials by David Mitchell (Page 243)
As if the book could read my mind and knew I was getting impatient. ;-)
We are only what we know.
— Cloud Atlas Hachette Essentials Edition Hachette Essentials by David Mitchell (Page 217)
I asked how Yoona had found the secret room. 'Curiosity,' she said. I didn't know the word. 'Is curiosity a torch, or a key?' Yoona said it was both.
— Cloud Atlas Hachette Essentials Edition Hachette Essentials by David Mitchell (Page 197)
[...] my dreams are the single unpredictable factor in my zoned days and nights. Nobody allots them, or censors them. Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.
— Cloud Atlas Hachette Essentials Edition Hachette Essentials by David Mitchell (Page 189)
All the seats were taken, and I had to squeeze into a three-inch slot. I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. The Diagonal People.
— Cloud Atlas Hachette Essentials Edition Hachette Essentials by David Mitchell (Page 170)
You would think a place the size of England could easily hold all the happenings in one humble lifetime without much overlap, I mean, it's not ruddy Luxembourg we live in, but no, we cross, criss-cross and recross our old tracks like figure skaters.
— Cloud Atlas Hachette Essentials Edition Hachette Essentials by David Mitchell (Page 165)
'So, Fay,' asks Grimaldi, balancing on the edge of his desk, 'what do we know about her?' Fay Li speaks as if from a mental checklist. 'Reporter at Spyglass -- I presume we all know it? Twenty-six, ambitious, more liberal than radical. Daughter of the Lester Rey, foreign correspondent, recently died. Mother remarried an architect after a dull divorce seven years ago, lives in uptown Ewingsville, BY. No siblings. History and economics at Berkeley, first class. Started on the LA Recorder, political pieces in the Tribune and Herald. Single, lives alone, pays her bills on time.'
— Cloud Atlas Hachette Essentials Edition Hachette Essentials by David Mitchell (Page 128)
(Bold mine)
An allusion to the first chapter?
