Reading matters

'Cloud Atlas' by David Mitchell

Fiction - paperback; Sceptre; 544 pages; 2005

Out of all the recommendations I have received from fellow book bloggers over the past few years, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas gets mentioned more than any other book. It has been lauded by so many people I was almost too scared to read it, which is why it languished in my ever-growing to-be-read pile for more than three years.

At one point I considered discussing it as part of Reading Matters Online Book Group and put it up for vote in February 2006. It lost out to Orhan Pamuk's Snow and it went back onto my pile of unread books once again.

When I finally worked up the courage to read it some 18 months later, I have to be brutally honest and say I could not work out what all the fuss was about.

'Black Swan Green' by David Mitchell

Fiction - hardcover; Random House; 294  pages; 2006

It's 1982. Duran Duran are the band of the moment, Margaret Thatcher is in power and the Falklands War is in full swing.

Jason Taylor, who lives in a small Worcestershire village called Black Swan Green, is 13 years old. When he's not at home with his squabbling parents and an older sister who wants to leave him in the lurch by fleeing to university as soon as she can, he's at school fending off the bullies who pick on his stuttering and lack of sporting ability. Desperate to belong, he hides several guilty secrets, including a burning desire to be a poet, and muddles through a year in which his parent's marriage disintegrates around him.

While Black Swan Green is not strictly a coming-of-age story, Jason Taylor does grow and change over the course of the 13 months in which the story is set. He loses his naivety and bolsters his poor self esteem by learning to stand up against those who bully him.

Coupled with the war against Argentina (in which a local boy is killed) and his parent's impending separation, he learns that the world is a much bigger, maybe darker, place than Black Swan Green.