Cloud Atlas malarky and a link for Clevelanders interested in...well, anything, I suspect

I haven't finished Cloud Atlas yet and yet I've managed, by sheer force of will and enthusiasm, to force one friend into buying it, which excites me to no end. I like being a pusher: I find music and I push it on anyone with ears, I read a book I love and I need my friends to read it. You know, generating the good karma ahead of time and all. I've already told several people they have to read the book, one of them being my girlfriend, who I know will love it, but who, over a late weekend diner breakfast, just had to ask me super-difficult questions about the book, like, "What's it about?" and "Where's it set?" and "What genre is it?" I'm not sure my answers, which ranged from "Uhhhhh" to "Errrrr" were really all that satisfying or inspiring, nor was my loose comparison to Infinite Jest all that factually correct, per se, but none of that matters since once she's got the time to spend reading books I beg her to read, I'll force it into her hands, having coated the cover in quick-drying superglue, which I'll refuse to provide the anti-glue for until she's read enough of the book to admit that, yes, it's a really exciting book. My guess: it'll take her about 60 pages to say so.

It's just one of those books that the less you know going into it, I suspect, the more colorful its wealth of mental fireworks will be.

Like I said, the Infinite Jest comparison is way off base, but I don't know what else to compare it to. I'm woefully under-read so there's probably lots of great comparison points out there, I just suck and don't know what they are. There are a few points of similarity between the two books though, one of which involves a super-clever descriptive metaphor or simile I've been cooking up which I'm saving for once I've finished the book, just to make sure that the whole thing doesn't fall apart by the end. I mean, I don't know, maybe the last hundred pages are photocopies of David Mitchell pointing and laughing at a horribly awkward photograph of me. It could happen. The one thing I will say, though, is that Cloud Atlas and Infinite Jest are similar in that they take a certain number of pages for the book to lock into place in your brain and not let go. When Maureen told me to read Wallace's book oh so long ago, she said what someone had once told her: you have to give it 200 pages. Which, you know, when someone gives audacious advice like "Give this book an entire book's length of pages and then you'll start to adore it" you kind of raise your eyebrow even as you pull out your credit card and head to Amazon. Mitchell's book, as hinted previously, I suspect, requires about 60 pages of reader's patience. 40 pages for the confusion to set in and 60 for your mind to melt into the words and the words to coagulate in your arteries. But oh man, when that happens. Look the hell out.

In other news, I offer up the following link, which hit me through my del.icio.us RSS feed on the site-wide "Cleveland" tag. Looks interesting and highly promising. The site seems a little incomplete right now but I chucked my e-mail into their mailing-list form and am curious to see what comes of it. I don't know much about it, though it looks like they're looking for artsy-type people, and I've half a mind to see if they'd be interested in writerly-readings, but I'm not sure what interest they'd have, what with big names like NASA and everybody else in the city in there, in a no-name writer like me reading stories about whatever I write about, which, lately, I don't even know what that is, from month to month. Anyways, check it out. The Flash (if that's what that is) is actually pretty cool, which Flash, usually, is not. I mean, it got me to stay on their page for longer than two seconds.

http://clientreview.liggett.com/ingenuity/home.asp