I’m trying to sneak one more book into the “read in 2011” pile, and this is it. David Mitchell’s very first novel, Ghostwritten, is a shiny early showcase for his immense talent. If I were a sentence highlighter, the insides of this book would already be bright yellow.

I’d thought about the girl every day since. Twenty or thirty or forty times a day. I’d find myself thinking of her and then not want to stop, like not wanting to get out of a hot shower on a winter morning. I ran my fingers through my hair and contemplated my face, using a Fats Navarro CD as a hand-mirror. Could she ever feel the same way back? I couldn’t even remember accurately what she looked like. Smooth skin, highish cheekbones, narrowish eyes. Like a Chinese empress. I didn’t really think of her face when I thought of her. She was just there, a colour that didn’t have a name yet. The idea of her.

Like his later books—Cloud Atlas especially—Ghostwritten is a Rubik’s cube of interlocking stories. We leap and land in various times and places, each narrated by a new character, in a new voice. Mitchell is a word acrobat; I think his writing is really inspiring.