Go Tell It On The Mountain

Morning weigh-in: 175#, 4.5% BF (WTF?)

Not likely weigh-in numbers: didn't eat yesterday except Taco Bell around 7:00, still affected by medications, especially GI situation with antibiotics. Scale says one thing, mirror tells a different story, hopefully my downtime weight loss doesn't include too much muscle. Meantime, dehydration sometimes lowers body fat analysis numbers, must drink more fluids...

I got a haircut on Saturday, usual place at the Palmer Park Mall; the receptionist said it'd be an hour wait so I wandered around, found myself in the bookstore. I remembered a book I'd heard about, asked for it, and yes they had it in stock so now it's mine -- I basically did nothing but read it for the rest of the weekend. Holy living fsck...

By the way, the book is Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell (here's a better review).

It's basically a set of six linked stories: a diary of an 1850's South Seas journey jumps to the letters of a British ne'er-do-well and composer in 1930's Belgium, then to 1970's California for a battle between a reporter and a nuclear power company, modern Britain, a nightmare futuristic "corpocracy" in Korea, and the center of the book, a post-apocalyptic Hawaii maybe a thousand or so years into the future. Each section, except the Hawaiian one, got only halfway into its story before jumping to the next; then after the Hawaiian story completes, the book runs backward through the sections, completing each story and finishing, back on Hawaii, with the South Seas journal. So what's the book about? Well, each story is about enslavement and the struggle to escape it, each in a different but thematically linked way.

The whole thing was sort of like climbing up and down a mountain, and at the "top" of the book the iron-age protagonist climbs Mauna Loa, with a woman from the last outpost of advanced civilization. (There are several other places and times where a man and a woman ascend to find some revelation, which may or may not be correctly understood.) But climbing down is always very different than going up, and a bit of an anticlimax, and that's the way the book was -- it was probably deliberate too, for reasons I won't mention because it'll give away some of the surprise. I'll just say though, that each section is written the way it's supposed to be, and it was a page-turner all the way to the end...