What are you reading right now?

"I haven't met anyone who didn't like Life after Life"

Seriously? I didn't like Life After Life. With tumble, that makes two of us just among the, what, 12 people on this thread.

The first third (half?) was terribly boring, with multiple ends as a child that don't advance the plot at all. Even when she gets to an adult age, she is the absolute most boring person ever to have featured in a novel. Nothing happens to her in any of her myriad lives nor does she do anything remotely interesting or important until the Blitz. (Those Blitz parts were OK, though).

The entire book feels like Groundhog Day, and that's not good for anybody. Tom Cruise's recent film Edge Of Tomorrow did this sort of thing well, but there was a good explanation there. One that actually made sense. Life After Life didn't make sense at all. If she is reincarnated, she should come back as someone else. If this is about parallel universes, she shouldn't be remembering what happened in a previous life. So what is going on? We don't know, except that this woman keeps coming back, getting only slightly less clueless and slightly less boring each time.

Funny enough, nobody I spoke to about this book shared my understanding of the moral of the story: That we are who we are because of a million chance events. If something happened in a split second in your past, you could have been that teacher or that 'spinster' or that alcoholic who committed suicide.

Cider with Rosie. I've read it before but thought I'd read it again after the TV adaptation last weekend. Laurie Lee was bought up by his Mother and Sisters, his Dad wasn't present in his life.

Have just finished Remnant Population. Feeling a bit reluctant to start anything else (have Ancillary Mercy waiting!) in case it leaves me feeling sad - Remnant Population left me smiling.

Can't remember who liked the Honor Harrington books, but have you tried Elizabeth Moon's Familias books? I have read a few Honor Harrington books but got tired of the right wing politics. Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan books may also be worth looking at.

I read a fair bit (less now I have small ones and fall into bed exhausted at 10).

I'm happy to suspend belief a bit, especially for first books in a series by an author (like pilot episodes) - a book has to be pretty bad before I give in (for instance, the true blood ones.. those are bad, I'm pretty sure she describes outfits just to get the word count up) - I've read so much SF that if I discarded something because I think someone else has done it better I'd have real problems (for example, and people are scandalised, but I really don't rate 1984)

I probably should go back and read some classics - I never have made it through Foundation for instance - but I'm taking notes here and will try some thing else (maybe even Dickens.. it's been a while)

I did re-read Heinlein recently. I adored him when I was a teenager, but now, it's all so distastefully misogynistic that I couldn't even make it re-through one of my previous favourited

I didn't like *Behind the Scenes at the Museum but Emotionally Weird^ has the best ever descriptions of life at a Scottish university in the mid to late 70s.

My appreciation for Dickens increases each time I re-read him, particularly for the complex structure of Bleak House.

I think there is a tradition of male-dominated criticism that has tended to diminish her complexity in a really patronising way that also fails to understand the extent to which she was really stretching the limits of what the novel could do.

Absolutely. I love Austen. Periodically I re-read her entire canon and my appreciation increases each time. I agree wholeheartedly with shovetheholly's post.

Sorry ALass, but Life After Life really didn't work for me. I'm not sure why, because in theory it's the kind of thing I like, so I tried Behind the Scenes at the Museum and that did nothing for me either. Then I gave up on Kate Atkinson!

I haven't met anyone who didn't like Life after Life.

My thoughts on Wool were similar to what I wrote about Station Eleven - first novel, superficial "world-building" that doesn't make much sense, nothing much happening, mediocre prose and improbable dialogues. You really need to suspend your disbelief to get over the glaring inconsistencies and lack of credible detail in both.

BigChoc - re "I normally read a few books per week"

Come join us fellow bookworms on the 50-Book Challenge. It would be great to have another sci-fi fan on there.

I deeply disliked The Girl With All The Gifts - It is a YA zombie story about the lovey feelings between a child zombie and her instructor (yes, really) that is full of juvenile truisms like:

• You can't be a child for ever, even if you want to be.
• You can't save people from the world. There's nowhere else to take them.

... and terrible writing such as:

• They're freaked and exhausted and starting at shadows. So is he, except that he does his freaking and starting mostly inside, so it doesn't notice as much.

Sorry slug - please don't hate me I have a profound hatred for YA in general and just been reading sci-fi for too long (over 30 years) to be content with last couple of years' post-apocalyptic YA.

There's a lot more to Austen than love stories, but you do have to have some quite specific knowledge of the period to get all the jokes and references. I'm not so up on Dickens (never much cared for him) but presume the same applies.

Austen just seems so anaemic compared to say Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Fielding. I appreciate those encompass a large time period. I don't think I have a particular knowledge of the time periods concerned beyond what any reasonably educated person will pick up.

Chunky I made my book group read Wool. I loved it but they all hated it!

The Martian was self-published but possibly it is an exception. My group all enjoyed it.

I think there's a real rash of mediocre SF (and probably other genres too) where self-publishing has led to people doing the equivalent of hotel room paintings in book form - formulaic, ill thought out etc.

It has brought some quite good stuff about too though - I've been working my way through a load of stuff by Edward W. Robertson (post plague ones, a Sci-fi opera, and some fantasy too) which are pretty good and whilst they often have a leading man, they have other characters too.

And of course Wool was good (Post-apocalyptic, silos, technocracy - so all themes I've read before, but still quite well done)

Austen's work is largely social commentary, isn't it? For example, the whole 'sensibility' thing had just come into fashion, the notion that diseases of the nervous system made all the very best people sensitive, fluttery and faint, thus giving life to more modern notions of romance. Sense and Sensibility is essentially about that, and she still marries the women off to rich men (so they were not that frivolous). And in Pride & Prejudice Mrs Bennett embodies fashionable sensibility perfectly, Wickham too in a caddish sort of way.

There's a lot more to Austen than love stories, but you do have to have some quite specific knowledge of the period to get all the jokes and references. I'm not so up on Dickens (never much cared for him) but presume the same applies.

To me Austen has almost nothing to do with love stories, though for sure the family issues are there.

Cote, have you read Stasiland by Anna Funder, The Prospect Before Her by Olwen Hufton or any Barbara Tuchman? I generally find nonfiction easier to read than fiction and enjoyed all of those. I have to say I don't really read scifi. I attempted one of Doris Lessing's scifi books and fell back defeated, but I guess that's rather like trying CS Lewis for a feminist love story.

I was going to suggest Ursula Le Guin and Earthsea but I assumed Cote would be familiar with her.

I do have some sympathy with Cote's issues with women writers. At its most simplistic it's why Dickens is one of my favourite writers and Austen isn't.

Dickens presents a panoply of characters from all levels of society. Love stories and family issues are there but as incidental to the plot , not the main concern.

Of course I get Austen was a woman of her time and its constraints but she operates in such a narrow field (and it's basically the same story in every book)

I'm reading Life in a Cold Climate, a biography of Nancy Mitford. I guess it has a feminist slant to it, in that Nancy Mitford and her five sisters were such unusual women.

I'm currently reading about the period of her life in which, although she is still married in name, both she and her husband are conducting blatant affairs but don't seem to mind about each other's indiscretions. The biographer makes an interesting point that, since then, people's behaviour has become more "modern" (i.e. anything goes) while our view of marriage has become more "traditional" (i.e. we expect fidelity). Except she phrased it much better than me

Cote, I agree with a lot of your criticisms, hence why I wasn't impressed to start with (and as you say, a virus that killed so quickly and comprehensively wouldn't survive long as I understand it), but I warmed to it after a while.

Not at all sure about your dislike of SF written by women in general though. I'd start with Ursula le Guin as exhibit A, and go on from there . . .

The first Donna Tartt was brilliant; the second wittered on and petered out without an ending. The third was awful, particularly the comedy Russian villains. Goodness that was a book which needed an editor.

I also like these series:
. Tanya Huff': Valor
. Elizabeth Moon: Paksenarrion and also Paladin