Cloud Atlas (The Book), and Why I Want its Last Line Tattooed Permanently on my Skin

Hold this book. Feel its weight, the five-hundred pages that are bound together by glue and pulp. Flip the pages and marvel at how thin and light each leaf is, and how the sun makes them transparent enough to read the words in reverse on the other side.

Marvel because this near weightless, hand-held, simple object carries the burden of civilization, leaves you burnt with passion, and inspires the genius of humankind.

This book is why literature should exist.

If I were to make a list of books that writers should read, this would be at the top. Anyone who loves literature - real literature, this book should have priority to move to the top of the to-read list.

It starts in the late 19th century with a San Franciscan on a boat leaving from Sydney writing a journal, but then it stops mid sentence.

Suddenly it's the 1930's and the main character is a (slightly mad) composer writing letters to his past lover who's still in England about this half-finished travel journal that he wants to finish reading - "a half-finished book is a half-finished love affair", as he writes.

This idea starts to permeate the rest of the story as his narrative ends halfway through as well and suddenly it's the 1970's; it turns into a mystery thriller, and the journalist protagonist meets the now elderly lover to the composer who has kept the letters for his whole life.

Continue this pattern of ending part-a-way through another two times, and it's moved into the future where the patterns start to weave themselves out of the threads of all the stories, and come together to face birth, life, and ultimately death - and what those even mean at all.

It's an exploration of humanity and the rise and fall of empires and what makes a person blaze with spirit at their very core. 

It sounds ambitious, but when the reviews say that every page moves forward with the force of molten lava, they don't exaggerate: it may be hard to penetrate the surface, and it may move slowly (in the beginning at least), but it burns with the kind of writerly genius that can only erupt a handful of times a generation.

This one's for the love of reading.

This one's for the writers.

This one's why literature should exist.