Ghostwritten

David Mitchell

Ghostwritten was one of the first books to hit my Amazon wish list back when I first set it up four years ago. I have no idea what inspired me to put it there, but having now finally read the thing, the question has gone from “why did I do this?” to “what on earth was I thinking?”

The story revolves (very slowly) around nine different characters whose lives interconnect. And while the characters themselves are interesting, Mitchell's portrayal of them doesn't do them justice. I'm not sure how one takes a member of a cult (based obviously on Falun Gong) on the verge of collapse and makes him boring, but it happens here. By the time you've meandered through forty uninteresting pages on the fourth or fifth of these characters, you'll have stopped caring in the least about how these connections are going to get more tenuous.