The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

Man wakes up, one of a few who can see in a world of blind people, and must find a way to survive with the added threat of plants that can walk, talk and sting.

Another futuristic story written in the past.  I love this book because it is written in such a straightforward style that it seems very credible, it is fantastically retro and it has a nice little love story.  I picked it up, by chance, at a second hand book shop.  I have read a few of his other novels since then, but I always return to this one.  

I took the picture at a vineyard near Matakana, a winegrowing area about an hour away from Auckland.  I thought it appropriate to take a picture near cultivated plants!

Undergoing review...

I am thinking about the format and will be back in the new year.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

There has been a lot of discussion going on lately about Cloud Atlas because of the movie coming out.  So, I thought I would write about it today. Difficult to describe - the thing that amazes me the most about this book, is how someone conceptualised the book and then was able to work in so many different styles, with different dialects and different worlds and still have a common thread running through the whole book. Did he write each story separately from beginning to end and then cut them in half or did he write the whole thing in order?  Or maybe he wrote a little bit here and a little bit there.  One day he would be chillin' in the Pacific Ocean and the next firmly in a dsytopian future.  Or maybe he just wrote 6 stories and stuck them together like that to screw with us. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Atlas_(novel)

Please note that Wikipedia articles may contain spoilers.