book: Life After Life

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, not the other one. This was the hardest book to read that I've read in awhile, in a very literal sense - I typically read without a bookmark (because that just invites one of the kids to yank it and lose my place), but the cyclical nature of the book, especially the earliest segments, made it really really hard to tell if I was in the right place when I picked it up again. (Do people know about this book? The central conceit is that our main character is living her entire life, birth to (varying) death, over and over again, with occasional deja vu from previous lives. So somewhat different than Replay-style looping as an adult.) Eventually I did resort to a bookmark, at which point it became hard to read because of all the dying (ways I worry my kids could die! tragic deaths! horrible deaths! etc.). But in fact it's a very interesting and powerful book.

This is going to be very incoherent, but I can't take the time to write this better: a bunch of it takes place during the Blitz, in London, and shows the terribleness of it quite graphically, and it made me think about how the US is now conducting a Blitz of our own with drones. And of course someone could argue "but drones have only killed 3000 people and the Blitz killed 40000." But that's just a matter of time, right? I mean, why would the US ever stop? (Have pro-drone supporters ever said anything to suggest that they think it should wrap up at some point?) This sense of futility and hopelessness made an interesting counterpoint to certain developments in the book. If anyone else has read it, I'd be very interested in discussing the ending.