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.
