A few days ago I finished reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. It only took me two and a half months, but it was well worth it. It was almost Joycean in some respects -- the absurdly skilled assumption of different techniques, genres, voices, and styles -- but what amazed me most was the realization of each of the worlds of the novel, and the "world" of a novel has become something increasingly interesting and troubling for me over the past year (at it's heart, that's what my thesis was really about), and Cloud Atlas realizes so many, 6 in all, so well, that it's almost obscene. But what what struck me the most was the interconnection, however small, which could have been gimmicky in the hands of a lesser writer, but under Mitchell it becomes something resounding, tenuous and pulsating, threatening to snap, and from this tension achieves a kind of music, beautiful and heart-breaking, as fragile and as vital as Ewing's belief in the final two pages.

You totally want to read it now, don't you? Go on, admit it.

But Cloud Atlas hasn't been all that I've been reading this summer. Here are some of the other books that I've either finished, am currently reading, or am reading piece by piece at an astonishingly slow rate:

Being-in-the-World by Hubert Dreyfus
Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling [oh, how depressing =( ]
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
James Joyce by Richard Ellman [finally finished it, 5 months later]
Everything that Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown [I figure that you can't criticize what you haven't read]
Literary Theory by Terry Eagleton
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

and of course Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell