Life after life kate Atkinson

[Gumnast2014]

Argghhh confused, restarted it twice.

Just can't get into it?

Keep going or give up?

Can anyone help with who is how? Honestly I'm lost.

[BritabroadinAsia]

Hi cote - fantastic, thank so much.... have read and enjoyed some of your list - Cloud Atlas is up there amongst my all time favourites. Some great suggestions, much appreciated. Will take a look on the other thread you mentioned. If you had to pick one, which would be your favourite and why?

Duchess - my book club are a mix of nationalities, the majority being Aussies who haven't studied the Tudors as we did at primary school(?), so my raving about Wolf Hall rather fell on deaf ears... but I will try with Queen's Gambit, thank you!

[mmack]

I read Life after Life last year and I can barely remember a thing about it. I remember thinking at the time that the plotting was excellent but the characters were boring.

[DuchessofMalfi]

I'd say there is enough in Queen's Gambit for a book club discussion. In fact, to help discussions there's a list of Reading Group Questions at the back. together with a further reading list. There's a timeline and character list (very full cast of characters) for anyone who isn't clear on who's who in the Tudor Court.

[CoteDAzur]

Brit - I'm going to break hearts go against the grain again and say that Crimson Petal and the White started out promising and well-written but then descended into 1000+ pages of pointless drivel about domestic boredom. If it had any point at all, it may have been that even the most interesting & amazing woman you can imagine (like an intellectual prostitute in Victorian London) will get dull and boring once she starts taking care of a small child full time. I don't think this was the intention of the author, though

Here are a few of the books I have found head and shoulders above the rest. Some are quite challenging but also very rewarding imho. Search for my name under 50-Book Challenge threads for details on most of them:

Biographies/autobiographies:
Alan Turing: The Enigma
The Strangest Man (Paul Dirac's biography)
Miracles Of Life (J G Ballard's autobiography)
Confessions of a Sociopath
Music In The Castle Of Heaven (Bach's biography)

Other non-fiction:
Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You
My Stroke Of Insight
The Worst Journey In The World

Historical Fiction:
Measuring The World (about Gauss)
The Luminaries (about New Zealand's gold rush)
This Thing Of Darkness (about Darwin's 5-year voyage about survey brig The Beagle)
Middlesex

Sci-Fi:
Classics - Dune, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1984, The Foundation, Time Enough For Love.
Hyperion
Neal Stephenson's books: Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Anathem, Cryptonomicon.
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (about magic, so fantasy not sci-fi)

Fiction:
Cloud Atlas
Anna Karenina
The Goldfinch
Umbrella
The Atrocity Exhibition

The last two are not only difficult to read but also likely to mess you up for weeks, so approach with caution. Great books, though

[Eliza22]

Definitely, The Crimson Petal & The White (bit of a tome, though) and the Dauphin.

All three, excellent reads!

[BritabroadinAsia]

Thank you Eliza and Duchess.... Much appreciated - would any of your recommendations above have enough discussion points for a book group that is rather limping along at the moment?

[Eliza22]

Brit another brilliant book .... The Lost King of France by Deborah Cadbury. A heart rending account of the final years of Marie Antoinette's son, his treatment by the revolutionaries as the orphaned dauphin and the fascinating scientific examination of his heart, stolen at his autopsy. Unputdownable and made me cry. Obviously, non fiction.

[DuchessofMalfi]

I enjoyed Queen's Gambit by Elizabeth Fremantle. It's about the life of Katherine Parr - her three marriages, not just the difficult one to Henry VIII. I thought it very well written, and definitely not a bodice-ripper :o

[Eliza22]

Brit have you read The Crimson Petal & The White by Michel Faber? excellent historical fiction. Also, The Sunne In Splendour by Sharon Penman? A Richard the III fact based fiction. I loved them both.

[BritabroadinAsia]

Thanks, cote - I do like historical fiction, but Hilary Mantel rather than bodice rippers, and yy to biographies, sci-fi, quite like a bit of popular science (anything layman-ish suitable for a non-scientist with diminishing intellectual capabilities), literary fiction... Please inspire me!

[CoteDAzur]

Brit - I'd be happy to give recommendations. What kind of books do you like to read? Non-fiction, historical fiction, sci-fi, biographies...?

[wiltingfast]

Life After Life was one of my favorites of 2014. I personally loved the non linear narrative but be warned, it is not a traditional plot driven book. Yes, "darkness falls" a lot and each time the heroine must try again and try until she finds away through each patch of her life. The differences in each progression can be subtle and you see knock on consequences for the people around her. Ursula clearly retains some sense of her past lives but it is not clear how much. She strains to save Ted for example with varying degrees of success. There's a sense that her mother too may also be retaining some sense of past lives but it is not explicit. I found the German chapters particularly poignant.

It's probably not for everyone but I would certainly recommend you read the firs few chapters and try and assess how interested (or not) you are in the author's premise. Life is too short to waste reading a book for the sake of it! The style does not change really, the first flavor is how it is throughout and while Ursula does eventually progress through a long life, it is slow if your aim is merely to see where she ultimately ends up. It is just not that kind of book.

[hackmum]

I thought Life after Life was both cleverly constructed and very moving. I think writing something that involves telling the same story over and again with minor variations is an extremely hard feat to pull off, but she did it brilliantly. She's a writer at the top of her game.

[KERALA1]

So subjective though and what I like depends on my mood. Sometimes I read Henry james. Sometimes I binge on ridiculous crime novels. Then something like life after life. Then wolf hall. Like them all for different reasons so incredibly hard to predict what someone else will enjoy.

[BritabroadinAsia]

Hi again Cote, thanks for your reply.

Fair point regarding Austen/Bronte. I see where you're coming from, (and happily agree to disagree wrt Life After Life) but am still intrigued by what I perceive as a fairly limited way of selecting what to read...

I would really love to hear some of your book recommendations, if you're willing? What you have you read that you have been challenged by? What have you loved?

Apologies, Gumnast, for derailing your thread. Did you carry on with the book or give up?

[DuchessofMalfi]

Cote - once I'm done with JS & MN I shall read it :) I have read several Kate Atkinson novels in the past, some of which I've enjoyed, and others not. I particularly enjoyed Behind The Scenes At The Museum but suspect that that wouldn't be one that would appeal to you.

As to Goodreads reviews - my opinion here is that I am only friends with people who I know have a similar taste in books as me. Some of those friends I have been friends with a long time now (2 years and upwards) and I tend to trust their book reviews and recommendations (certainly more so than some of the oddly random computer-generated selections from Goodreads :o)). I've had some great book discoveries from there in the past.

[CoteDAzur]

"I've never had a problem choosing books which suit me"

Aren't you lucky. I'm getting rather cranky picky in middle age.

Let me know what you think about Anathem and let's talk afterwards about whether you would appreciate a heads-up about how challenging a book is in the future

[SoMuchForSubtlety]

I loved Life After Life. It had such a nice rhythm to it, as well as being contemplative - it made me ponder the nature of throwaway grand statements about life ambition and how many things actually add up to make a life what it is (both the avoidance of disaster and otherwise). I like a contemplative book that doesn't try to be glitzy and impress you.

[CoteDAzur]

Duchess Read it and let us know what you think.

[CoteDAzur]

"the really rather wonderful Life After Life..... Surely you don't just have to rely on visual clues and hearsay - you could try Goodreads, for example"

You see, that is why Goodreads is useless - there are people there (like you here) who feel Life After Life is really wonderful and that is very far from my perspective. Recommendations only mean something if you know the person who is giving you the recommendation - what her tastes are, the kind of books she reads, etc. So, if I have graded 3 friends on a scale of 1 (totally unlike my taste) to 10 (very much like my taste) and three of them have given this book 5, 3, and 2*, I can take a weighted average of their ratings:

[(2 x 5) + (5 x 5) + (9 x 2)] / 16 = 3.3_ More useful to me than the arithmetic average 4_ which is all I'd get from Goodreads and Amazon. We all do a vague version of this calculation in RL - i.e. give more importance to the recommendations of friends who read/like books we read/like.

"Sense and Sensibility and Wuthering Heights wouldn't have made the cut if you were to maintain a policy of avoiding debut novels by female authors"

It was extremely difficult for a woman to be an author and be published at that time, so the odds were actually quite good that any novel by a female author would be extraordinary. You see where I'm going with this.

"while describing a novel as 'life affirming' is a lazy review cliche, my experience of reading much great literature (and I use the term advisedly) has been just that."

Heart-warming and life-affirming, I find, is what book "critics" in women's mags etc say when the book doesn't actually have any merits that that would appeal to a reader like me - not literary, not intellectual, not challenging, not edgy, not new and different (for me).

[DuchessofMalfi]

You're all making me want to read Life After Life now. Curious

[Sootgremlin]

It did seem a little patronising though I'm sure you didn't mean it so.

Infant school is the first 3 years of school and as books at primary level are classified by difficulty and colour-coded at levels you have to move through before you are allowed to choose freely, I found the idea of choosing books according to difficulty as an adult quite funny.

I've never had a problem choosing books which suit me, and you can't classify boredom, you have to find it out yourself. If a book was a 500 word YA book I find it hard to believe you couldn't deduce it fairly easily it wasn't for you after a page or so though (and even kindle books you can return).

You make exactly my point about Anna Karenina - how do you classify challenging? A lot of people do read it for the romance, but they might come by some other things that challenge them along the way. A difficult sticker would put off even more people who might find they enjoy it.

Plus, you would never be pleasantly surprised, as I was by Life after Life. It was not a book I would normally choose, actually, but I found it an unexpected pleasure to read. I probably wouldn't have read it if it was called 'easy' and put in the pink and frilly pile, so think it was pitched about right. I don't think a lot of people would put it there, either.

As an aside, found Anathem for a quid on the Kindle after you mentioned it, and it looks great

[BritabroadinAsia]

Cote, I think to classify the really rather wonderful Life After Life as 'easy contemporary fiction' is doing Kate Atkinson's beautiful prose a disservice; I found her descriptions of life during the Blitz incredibly affecting, quite unlike anything else I've read about the period. In terms of structure, I have some empathy with gumnast - please do persist, by the way - as the plot device is initially potentially confusing, and I consider myself a reasonably discerning reader.

I agree with Scottgremlin that your proposed labelling would be reductive and off-putting. Surely you don't just have to rely on visual clues and hearsay - you could try Goodreads, for example, for thoughtful, well-written reviews that can be filtered to avoid spoilers.

Sense and Sensibility and Wuthering Heights wouldn't have made the cut if you were to maintain a policy of avoiding debut novels by female authors...personally, I think it would be a shame to be miss out on the possibility of discovering a contemporary equivalent. And while describing a novel as 'life affirming' is a lazy review cliche, my experience of reading much great literature (and I use the term advisedly) has been just that.

Apologies if my tone sounds a little snippy. I shall return to nursing my hangover with paracetomol and Grazia.