Life after life kate Atkinson

I don't know what "infant school" is but I doubt you were reading lots while going there. And Anna Karenina is not an easy book for readers who don't skip the parts about politics and economics to get to the romantic drama bits.

This wasn't meant to be condescending. I was talking about a system to give the adult reader about what they can expect when they pick up a book. Specifically, it would have be very useful for me if I could recognise in advance that that The Girl With All The Gifts is a 500-word easy YA. I'm sure DontCall's mum would also be interested in being able to reliably pick out the books she can follow. My dear friend who usually reads easy-ish women's fiction just picked up Alan Turing: The Enigma after watching the film. I bet she would have loved to know in advance that it is a very difficult read, focusing heavily on the higher mathematics that Alan Turing and his contemporaries were working on.

Instead, we all have to rely on visual clues and hearsay - I steer away from pink covers with frilly letters, first novels from especially women authors, recommendations from low-life gossip rags like Heat and Grazia, and key words like "light" "heartwarming" & "life-affirming" in its reviews. This usually works, but it's very annoying when books like Life After Life, The Book Thief, and The Girl With All The Gifts slip through, for example.

They have just a such a system as you describe for classifying books, cote, I left it behind in infant school and have been happily choosing books and forming opinions of my own on them ever since. I wouldn't like to take such a retrograde step.

I read for pleasure and there are many ways to derive pleasure from a text. It doesn't necessarily reflect on the sophistication of the reader if they don't approach a novel as if they were completing a Sudoku.

Moments in a book can be beautifully described, or transcendent, or funny. Anna Karenina is very easy to follow, but you'd miss a good deal of why it's brilliant and challenging if you just focused on 'the story' of affairs and farming. Ditto Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch or....ad infinitum.

"she reads half a page of a book a night and falls asleep, so complains she can't follow plots involving time shifts! Seriously I think that show show well it's done"

Or that it was so simple, undemanding, and unsophisticated that even someone who can't follow most books can follow it. (With all due respect to your mum, who I'm sure is a lovely person). I mean, even the chapters are named exactly the same in each life - there are 10 chapters named "Snow" and 5 named "Armistice" in this book. How can anyone not follow this book? To know where you are in the story, just look at the name of the chapter you are reading.

Horses for courses - I prefer challenging books that people with short attention spans would not find a breeze to read.

I wish books were classified not just according to genre but also on a scale of difficulty (Easy - Average - Hard - Challenging, for example) so that we could see at a glance that a The Book Thief is Average YA, Life After Life is Easy Contemporary Fiction, and Anathem is Challenging Sci-Fi.

Sorry "40 page RULE".

I loved this though it was confusing to begin with. I have a 40 page file though. If I'm not feeling it up to p40, it goes back to the library. I don't buy books anymore, for this very reason.

My favourite thing about this book is that my mum lent it to me, despite the fact she reads half a page of a book a night and falls asleep, so complains she can't follow plots involving time shifts! Seriously I think that show show well it's done, there's a strong logic to the book, I rarely got lost. As a conceit, I guess a lot of the time I read books wishing a character hadn't done a given thing; in this book anything you wish she'd not done you get to see what happens if she hadn't - outcome not always good.

A wonderful, eventful, interesting and just beautiful book.

Loved it. Boring life?! Did we read the same book? Really stayed with me very affecting. Majority of my book group loved it too unusual we are very discerning

Loved it - agree that restarting probably isn't the best to way to go as it becomes clearer the more you read.

OP don't give up; you just need to keep on and take on all the changes and about-turns. It's so interesting seeing the consequences of the smallest actions and how things turn out!

Thanks strongandlong. Very useful interview, she settles the question! Like I said in my message don't have the book to hand to reread the ending. KA's next book out soon is about Ursuala's younger brother, Teddy, though I think the Life After Life conceit is abandoned. I can't wait.

I've messaged you, reread the relevant passages and messaged you again. :)

There's an interesting interview with KA here - lots of spoilers

Agree, I thought she didn't change the course of history either, plus that episode wasn't her last life, the last life was less interesting in my recollection which is why I wondered "why end the novel now?"

How does she change the course of history? My recollection was she tried and failed. DM me if you don't want to post a spoiler

Ah I get it. I thought the repeated appearances of the various settings and characters gave it a sort of rhythm against which the differences between her lives stood out. I liked that. I can see that it would be pretty tedious if you didn't enjoy it though.

I love Groundhog day too :)

Aside from 'the plot', it is beautifully written, I found it a delight in that sense, so worth reading for that alone.

It muses very well on the impact of societal shifts on the family, history on the individual, and the effects of two World Wars within half a century on both. Also the relationship between reader and writer...how much is an author guided by what the reader might want? Can you kill off a favourite character or must they return? Does the reader have some control?

I think the ending plays on the illusion of choice that has been created and sustained throughout the book; if Ursula has multiple lives potentially within her, so does everyone else, especially the novelist.

What we obviously meant by "lives the same life over and over again" was that she isn't born as a princess one time, as a fisherman's daughter living on a boat the next, etc. She is born into the same family, with the same parents, in the same house every single time. Most of the characters are the same in each life. It is a Groundhog Day scenario.

It would have been OK if said lives weren't so incredibly dull for the most part. The book would have also been more tolerable if this reincarnation happened to a slightly more interesting/intelligent/colorful person.

I feel like I must have read a different book to you cote and 2rebecca. She doesn't live the same life over again. Some versions are short/boring/banal some are incredibly sad and some are amazing.

It it isn't only her own fate that changes, in the end (trying to avoid spoilers here) she changes the course of history.

I enjoyed it until the ending. It was like she just got bored and decided to stop writing. She could have stopped at the end of any of the other lives and it wouldn't have made an difference.
I like proper endings.
Why did you think the ending was clever 5446? maybe I missed something, to me it just sort of stopped.

I'm struggling with it too but my MIL and some friends have raved about it so keep persevering . Problem is every time I have a break from it I have to reread from the beginning.

I got this a while back and only read a couple of pages and it didn't really appeal much to me. But I'll give it another go. My favourite KA was the one about Tracey the ex policewoman turned security guard. I've not read all of them though.

I adore Kate Atkinson but I have to confess I never quite managed to finish this one. I just stopped caring after a while.

I adored it, it's one book that stuck with me for a long time after.

I read around 120-150 books a year, so they have to be pretty good to do that.

Thought the ending in particular was so clever.

Without any spoilers, I totally disagree she led the most boring life imaginable. Each to their own.