Peaeater

Peter's summer reading club recommends:

P.D. James - The Children of Men

The last human being is born in 1995, Year Omega; mass infertility has doomed the human race to extinction. By 2021 the slowly dying citizenry of England have given themselves over to a dictator who promises comfort, peace, and freedom from boredom until the end of their numbered days. Peace and order are a strictly enforced illusion, but what do quiet atrocities matter in the last days of a dying species?

Everyone has seen the movie version but me. I didn't even know it existed.

David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

Not actually an atlas of cloud formations, but a set of stories that contain each other like Russian dolls. Never really got the title, as a matter of fact. Each story makes it about halfway before being interrupted by the next, only to appear within it. The first story is a series of journal entries discovered on a dusty bookshelf in the second, for example. Once you finish out the final story embedded in the middle of the book, you come back to all the stories you left behind. The second half of the journal entries is found propping up the bedstead, in case you were wondering.

David Mitchell's spectacular prose is nothing short of jaw-dropping. If I could write like that, I would call myself a writer. Each novella is written in a different genre, and he masters them all. I have to single out The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish because it had me laughing like a hyena clown.

Scott Smith - The Ruins

An awfully stupid book. Clumsy writing. Moron characters. My desire for revenge on the author grew as I flipped the pages, sublimating into a murderous hatred for those one-dimensional idiot boobs he limply positioned as main characters. I couldn't wait for them all to succumb to the horrors of the (eye-roll) killer vines. Like eating a snot sandwich: I gagged all the way through.