Life After Life, Kate Atkinson

I always read a ton right at the end/beginning of a year and then I ease into a slower reading pace, which fluctuates a bit based on my travel schedule. (I have a habit, which I'm trying to improve, of carrying around books and never actually opening them when I travel. That actually happened to me with Life After Life, which I was reading in a hardback edition that I dutifully brought on a 4-day business trip to Washington, DC and never touched, not even on the train.) By the end of January of this year, I had already finished 7 books in 2016. In February, I read 4, March 3, and here we are nearing the end April, which is likely to be 3 again. (I had one false start in April, which maybe makes this number artificially low: I signed up for a Pulitzer Winners book club and thought I might actually join them in reading their April selection, The Confessions of Nat Turner. I read it for about 5 days, realized I would have to devote a whole weekend to reading it in order to finish it in time for the club meeting, and decided I didn't like it enough to do that; so I abandoned it at the end of its first section.) Anyway, my slower pace should make my task of writing a little something about each book easier, but I'm not sure if it does.

I picked up Life After Life after deciding to abandon Nat Turner because I wanted something that would absorb me, something I'd love. Up til now, I had only read Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie detective novels, so this was my first time reading her (to assign it a genre) literary fiction, but I was confident enough from my enjoyment of the Jackson Brodie novels that I would enjoy this. I have to admit, when I started the book, it was a little startling. (I knew nothing about it, which is often the case for me when I start books: I avoid reading reviews or even back-cover blurbs; it's hard to explain.) Anyway, Life After Life played with reality in a way I wasn't anticipating, but which I'm sure anyone who has read even a cursory description of the book would know. The book started over and over and, especially at the beginning, often didn't get very far before starting again. I was immediately absorbed - the way I wanted to be - but then I felt dropped when everything stopped and started over again. I did get to like it - love it - eventually, but it took a little while. My favorite thing about the book is that you, the reader, get to decide what to believe. You can choose the version of events -- the life -- that you like best. It's almost like an even less deterministic choose-your-own adventure.

Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen

I rarely reread books, but I pulled Pride & Prejudice off my shelf for a second reading this weekend because I was in the mood for comfort reading. I wanted to sit up in bed and read all day, and that is, in fact, pretty much how I spend my Sunday. Pride & Prejudice has often been something I've turned to for comfort, but not the book. I've spent many a sick, or sad, or hungover day watching the full 6-hours of the BBC miniseries, some episodes twice over. It was strange to reread the book being now so familiar with its content.

I read Pride & Prejudice for the first and only (until now) time in 2004, when I was 28. I somehow managed to get through all my schooling and early adulthood without ever having read Jane Austen, and I had also pretty much managed to avoid all the adaptations of her books (the only exception I can think of is Clueless). At the time, I was unemployed and living in a sublet and had run through the small collection of books I had that weren't in storage, so I pulled Pride & Prejudice from the small fiction collection I found in my sublet apartment.* I wasn't expecting to, but I loved it. I didn't know it would be so accessible, so funny. At the time, I had read hardly any 19th century English literature at all and I lumped the Brontës and Jane Austen (and all the rest of it, really) together in my head and it just didn't interest me. Reading Pride & Prejudice changed my whole perspective. I went on to read every other Jane Austen book in quick succession and a few years later I spent a year reading almost exclusively 19th century English literature and who knows if I would have done any of this if I had not picked Pride & Prejudice off the shelf in my sublet.

Between 2004 and now, I also became quite a consumer of Jane Austen adaptations for film and TV. I go to them again and again for comfort viewing and, especially, to the Pride & Prejudice BBC miniseries. I know it nearly by heart. When I started the book again, my first thought was that it felt clunky and stiff, compared to what I had become so familiar with watching and hearing. I got over that and became absorbed in the book pretty quickly after the first chapter, but I never really got over knowing the lines already. I was surprised at how true the BBC series was to the book in language. I tried, as I was reading, to be particularly attentive to the bits that were left out of the miniseries to see if they gave a different sense of anything. Occasionally I was gratified.

In any case, it was a pleasure, and really was comforting, to reread Pride & Prejudice. Maybe I should reread books more often.


*This is also the story of how I started Proust, because P&P only kept me occupied for a couple days.

The Ruined Map, Kobo Abe

I found a copy of The Ruined Map in a church basement thrift store that only operates on Thursdays where the price of books is pay-what-you-want. Kobo Abe's name was faintly familiar to me, and the description sounded intriguing, but mostly I liked the cover. This is only the second Japanese novel I've read (when I first started my world books project, Teru Miyamoto's Kinshu: Autumn Brocade was the first book I read as part of my undertaking). The Ruined Map is a roughly 300-page detective novel, the first 275 pages of which read much like any detective novel (though with some gorgeous imagery and some distinctly Japanese events) and then the last 25 pages just kind of blow your mind. At least, they blew my mind. It was confusing as hell, but I really liked the turn the book took at the end. Up until the end, I have to admit I found the book to be kind of a slog and occasionally a not-good kind of confusing. It's hard to explain without being explicit, but I wish the book had done what it did at the end earlier and more. As it is, my review of it would be The Ruined Map: I really liked the end.