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.

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 :)

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

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?"

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

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

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.

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!

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

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

A wonderful, eventful, interesting and just beautiful book.

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.

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.

Sorry "40 page RULE".

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

"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).

Duchess Read it and let us know what you think.

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.

"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

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.