For the past 15+ years, I’ve been the target audience for the Man Booker awards: literary fiction snob leaning to British Commonwealth authors. Though I have been branching out into other genres over the last few years, I still look to the Booker long- and shortlists for recommendations and usually pick up at least a few each year. For some reason, I haven’t looked much into other prizes until this year when I realized the Baileys (formerly Orange) prize lists would be a great resource […]
If you want to understand deja vu better, this might help…
“Mom, after someone dies and becomes a ghost, do they become a kid again?” My four-year-old asked me this just a day after I finished reading Atkinson’s book, Life After Life. “Well, some people believe that. It’s called reincarnation.” I told him, wondering if his earlier comment about how I should wear a certain necklace “the next time I got married” was related to this conversation. While I’m not sure Life After Life is about reincarnation, parallel universes, or a hybrid of both, it nonetheless […]
Reincarnation meets Groundhog Day….
Not my ideal choice for a first pick, but it was a book club selection that I was supposed to have read back in Nov/Dec, and I’m nothing if not an extraordinary procrastinator. I persevered through this with the gusto of someone who is determined to stick with a New Years Resolution. If I picked this up in October, I couldn’t guarantee the same enthusiasm. Life After Life was one of those books that I finished and said, “I think I liked it? Maybe? I […]
“Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.”
Life After Life has been on my radar for over a year. It sounded intriguing – what would happen if you lived your life over and over again, and how would minute changes in your choices and actions affect that life? I was intrigued, but not drawn in. My mom read it with her book club late last year and her reaction to the work was “it was different. Not bad, but definitely different.” With that less than stellar review I pushed it further down […]