Chris

The movie also seems to explicitly , which I find really lame.

I definitely agree with this. I'm reading it a second time for the cast, and I find those elements more off-putting to me this time around.

In general I think Mitchell's biggest strength is his ability to inhabit a character and give it a voice. That's definitely the biggest joy of Cloud Atlas for me. It's definitely true that, especially being such a sprawling novel, Cloud Atlas doesn't have such particular questions to raise as The Sense of an ending; but in the aggregate I think it does meditate considerably on the nature of humanity. It just does it more through the totality of the thing (particularly in the second half) than through the close interrogation of individual memories.

I agree. This guy has been absolutely invisible to her for 40 years (after not really clicking as a couple in the first place), and suddenly he comes out of absolutely nowhere to bother her about what is basically an ancient artifact related to what is probably the most disruptive event (or series of events) that has ever occurred in her life. That's not to say that someone else in the exact same situation might not have reacted differently; everyone reacts differently to unusual circumstances. But I don't think her response makes her an unbelievable character, or a horrible person.

Yeah, her Cromwell was amazing. I also think it's probably worthwhile even just from a historical perspective to have a more sympathetic portrayal of the man floating out there in the culture, not because I necessarily think it's more "correct," but just because popular perspectives on a figure like Cromwell are already so influenced by existing negative fictional portrayals (like A Man for All Seasons, which I admit comprised most of my knowledge of him) which are unlikely to be overwhelmingly more historical than Wolf Hall anyway. I guess I just feel like it's pretty uncommon for any human being to b entirely capricious, and so if you're going to have an opinion of someone that is not the result of firsthand observation or true rigorous historical research, it's probably a decent policy to try and understand that human's actions through an ultimately sympathetic lens that frames those actions in the context of their era, society, and environment. Even if that lens is a fictional one.

I really enjoyed all of the architectural stuff in Devil in the White City, but all of the Holmes stuff with made-up interiority drove me nuts. I don't think I would have minded if it had been written as an actual historical novel like Wolf Hall, which is firmly situated in historical events but is clearly fiction; as it stands, I thought the quality of the fiction-like prose was really poor and the author definitely presented it as historical. I guess a lot of that is just how one chooses to interpret the book; I couldn't get away from that interpretation.

Welcome folks!

Correct. I recreated it from a shitty compressed version I found.

I've heard so many great things about The Art of Fielding that I feel like I should probably read it. None of the three of us has read it so it might make for a good pick!

Please don't order anything from these old crappy stores if you can resist! We are planning on doing a real print run of that Top Gun shirt in the relatively near future, and it will done by a real screenprinter rather than a crappy on-demand automated shop. We don't actually get any money from the old Cafepress store or Spreadshirt store and we'd also just prefer to sell higher-quality merchandise that we can actually physically approve in person before putting it up for sale.

For what it's worth, I read Cloud Atlas first (not strictly by choice, as De Zoet hadn't been published yet) and didn't have any problem getting into it. I don't say that to discount your opinion, but just to offer a contrasting view by someone who has also read both books.

Ever since idlethumbs.net was first launched in early 2004, it has run on its own CMS! It's not new to us. Thanks, Doug!

Cloud Atlas. It's the second book we're reading for the Idle Book Club!

Unless you already know you DO care about any of those things strongly, I don't see what's wrong with having a simple preference, or a set of preferences based on different contexts. There are things that are inconvenient about physical books--mainly their weight--but on balance I still prefer them. I also don't have a problem with ebooks even though I don't read them. I don't think there needs to be any real conflict.

This is definitely something I love. Once at an airport going through customs, a guy was reading the exact same edition of The Island of the Day Before as I was; once on a bus, I was reading Foucault's Pendulum and got into a big discussion about The Name of the Rose with another rider; and just recently I was reading Wolf Hall in a cafe and was approached by a guy who not only had read and loved the book but was also much more familiar with Tudor-era history than I was, which was really fascinating.

I don't really think that distinguishes game devs from anyone else. Most people with real jobs don't have time to be reading huge articles in the middle of the day. If you care about long-form journalism, or serious writing of any kind, you'll find the time. If it's not as high on your list of priorities, you'll find time for other things instead. (The main exception to this is students, especially high school students and undergraduates, who do generally have more free time to spend in total.)

Oh man, I love stuff like that. Or maybe I'm thinking of a different thing. If you mean stuff like laudatory blurbs, that's not so much what I like. I buy mainly hardbound books, which less commonly have that sort of thing. I love flipping through the initial buffer of copyright/colophon/title pages. (Also I bought an iPad a few months ago and I think it's a pretty nice piece of technology but at this point 90% of its use for me is the New York Times Crosswords app. Hmm.)

I don't think there were any huge spoilers really. It's probably not a big deal either way.

Awesome!

The only authority I claim is having worked at two game studios where that has been the case, and knowing a ton of game devs who reference the site all the time. One thing I've said on Idle Thumbs many times is that I feel game players, journalists, and devs are essentially similar to one another in terms of taste and opinions about games, even though obviously devs have a massive additional amount of technical knowledge and skill on top of that. But in terms of the fundamental approach to what games are and what games are good, I think those groups are essentially aligned at least in the broad strokes, so it shouldn't be much of a surprise that they rely on similar websites.

Yes! He is doing most of our front end work.

I'm totally in favor of ebooks existing and of people buying and reading them; I'm just in favor of hardcover books for myself. It's totally a preference thing, not a fundamental philosophy thing. I love physical typeset books with gorgeous covers that I can hold and look at up close and put on a bookshelf and notice while I walk by. But ultimately the physical object isn't what makes the book. Whatever way people want to read is great as far as I'm concerned.

Bel Canto is on our own list of potential selections as well, actually.

It's basically deliberate, yes. We don't want it to be dry, obviously (and I'm sure it'll take us a couple episode to fine-tune that stuff) but I think we also don't want it to veer into Idle Thumbs bonkers-land. I love Idle Thumbs bonkers-land but I don't know if I would even be personally able to maintain doing two podcasts in that style. It feels like there are certain brain muscles I need to exert to keep up with someone like Jake in the Idle Thumbs format (which don't even think I'm usually able to do), because he just has such a strong facility for the goofy shit we do, but at the current Thumbs release schedule I can basically hold it together. Adding another podcast like that would be hard for me. That's a very self-absorbed answer, though. We did obviously talk about this pretty concretely among the three of us, and I think the conclusion we came to is that the Idle Book Club has an actual Topic in the way that Idle Thumbs doesn't, and so it makes sense to try and keep it a bit more on the rails. Idle Thumbs only has a topic insofar as it encompasses absolutely anything related to video games we'd ever want to talk about, including games themselves, the industry that surrounds them, the figures who populate that industry, and entirely made-up shit connected to games by only the thinnest thread. The Book Club I think really is more about what we love specifically about individual books or the experience of reading, and for the most part that experience is a somewhat more subdued one than playing a video game where you jump around like an insane person hitting everyone in sight with a massive hammer, or whatever. I think to some degree it's a matter of being true to that experience, rather than saying "We're Idle Thumbs and we're crazy!!!" regardless of whether the subject matter demands it. Of course, we obviously have already demonstrated that we're willing to branch out into discussions of other media (which I'm sure will occasionally include games) in this episode, and I think that's because the actual experience of enjoying literature (or any kind of art or entertainment) involves flexing critical muscles that have been exercised by reflection on all the other stuff you've read, watched, listened to, or played. And, ultimately, I think the most overriding and important explanation of the episode's tone is this: When we, as friends, talk about what we've been reading, this is basically what it sounds like, just as when we, as friends, talk about what we've been playing, it sounds like Idle Thumbs. SO THERE.

I didn't know that either!