Due to one thing and another, I'm listening to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob deZoet while reading Ghostwritten, both by David Mitchell. If nothing else, the two books show Mitchell's versatility. Thousand Autumns is a fairly straightforward historical novel about a Dutch trading outpost in Japan in the late 1700s, while Ghostwritten is a loosely linked collection of narratives (each with a very distinct narrator).
I'm less than halfway through either book, so I'm hesitant to give impressions. The third story in Ghostwritten, for example, was radically different from what had come before, and more reversals could easily come. But it's clear that Mitchell has some serious literary chops, and I'm enjoying both books very much.
On a side note, I finished book 23 of the Iliad, coming up now to the big finale. Woohoo, it's been a long journey.
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