Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblad, and this is Bookworm. Today I am delighted

to have here in the studio, David Mitchell, whose most recent book, Cloud Atlas, has recently

been published in paperback by the relatively new Random House Division of Paperbacks.

He's the author as well of No. 9 Dream and Ghost Written.

I want to say immediately that over the past 12 months, this is easily the book that's given me the most pleasure, the one that's

excited me the most, and this author, the one I've most been looking forward to talking with.

Cloud Atlas is a book which contains six embedded stories.

Their variance, it seems to me, on the theme of greed as it moves its way through different ages and different fields, beginning with the greed of imperialism, moving to the greed and envy implicit in the world, in the world of classical

music, to commercial publishing, to a future corporate world in which really punishing

and corporate spying become the metier and then to a sort of futuristic world

where the consequences of all this greed seem to be the crushing of the human and its aspirations

leading to something post-civilized, post-linguistic, and post-human.

In other words, it's following as it goes the way in which our human complexity is balanced by a need somehow for human destruction, and wants to answer the impossible question of what we

might be able to do to salvage the human.

That's a wonderfully complete description of my book, Michael.

Thank you.

Yes.

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