Saturday, November 1, 2014, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Meet the Author (Virtually)

According to that absolutely unimpeachable font of all wisdom, Wikipedia:

Atkinson was born in York, the daughter of a shopkeeper. She studied English literature at the University of Dundee, gaining her master's degree in 1974. Atkinson subsequently studied for a doctorate in American literature, entitled "The post-modern American short story in its historical context". She has often spoken publicly that she failed at the viva (oral examination) stage. After leaving university, she took on a variety of jobs from home help to legal secretary and teacher. Atkinson has been married twice, whilst a student to the father of her first daughter Eve, and subsequently to the father of her second daughter Helen.

Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year ahead of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins's biography of William Ewart Gladstone. It went on to be a Sunday Times bestseller. Since then, she has published another five novels, one play, and one collection of short stories.

Her work is often celebrated for its wit, wisdom and subtle characterisation, and the surprising twists and plot turns. Some of her work has featured the former detective Jackson Brodie. She has frequently criticised the media's coverage of her work—when she won the Whitbread award, for example, it was the fact that she was a "single mother" who lived outside London that received the most attention.

In 2009, she donated the short story "Lucky We Live Now" to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Atkinson's story was published in the Earth collection.

In March 2010, Atkinson appeared at the York Literature Festival, giving a world-premier reading from an early chapter from her novel Started Early, Took My Dog (2010), which is set mainly in the English city of Leeds.

Atkinson was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to literature.

Kate Atkinson on Life After Life

The following YouTube video was taken from an Australian book talk program sponsored by Random House and features Kate Atkinson answering questions about her best-selling book.


Reviews of Life After Life

This section probably should be ignored at least until you've finished the book, maybe even until after the discussion. After I finish a book, I always look up reviews online to see if opinions contradict or validate mine. Most of the reviews I found online were pretty favorable. This is is just a sample via clickable links.

The Guardian
The New York Times
NPR
Salon

 On the contrary side, though, I did find this guy who apparently posts book reviews online via semi-automated comic strips uploaded to YouTube. Apparently this guy didn't like the book and was not too shy to talk about it—for 20 minutes. I thought it was a hoot, but as I said before, you might want to wait until after the group discussion before watching.

Saturday, October 4, 2014, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Meet the Author

Gillian Flynn, who pronounces her first name with a hard g as in "gills", was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1971. Her parents were both community college professors; her mother taught reading, and her father taught film. She grew up watching a lot of movies. She attended first the University of Kansas and then Northwestern University, majoring in journalism and hoping to be a crime reporter, but soon came to the conclusion that she was not cut out for that kind of work. She eventually found work with Entertainment Weekly magazine and stayed for ten years, first as a reporter and then as their resident television critic for the last four years she was there. Before her mega best-seller Gone Girl, Flynn wrote two other crime novels, Sharp Objects and Dark Places, both of which and/or available for electronic download from the San Leandro Library.

I found the following short YouTube clip in which Gillian Flynn answers questions about Gone Girl. The heading says "spoiler alert," but if you've gotten more than halfway through the book, this clip won't spoil anything for you.




Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

The movie version of Gone Girl is coming out this Friday, the day before our meeting, and stars Ben Affleck as Nick and Rosamund Pike as Amy.



I was curious to see who was going to play the "ugly" Detective Rhonda Boney, and of course Hollywood being as it is, Boney is played by the lovely Kim Dickens.

True Crime

Do people really carry out complex, multi-year revenge plots? The answer is yes. As I was reading the book, I kept being reminded of an elaborate real-life revenge plot that has haunted me ever since I heard about it back in 1999, which involved a man "punishing" his wife for what he saw as an act of betrayal that occurred very early in their relationship. If you are deeply affected by hearing of the depths of human evil, do not follow this link. While I was tracking down that story, I came across, this story about another complicated revenge plot, this one involving a frame-up by a police informer of a woman who had dumped him. This would also make a good story but was hell for the woman who lived it.

Talking to the Police

In Gone Girl, Nick Dunne's interactions with the investigating officers are largely informed by ideas gleaned from movies and television, most of which were at least somewhat inaccurate. One of the most harmful delusions that Nick was laboring under was that he shouldn't have an attorney present during his police interviews because "only guilty people" needed to "lawyer up". This gives me the opportunity to link to this lecture at the very conservative Regent University (founded by Pat Robertson), conducted by a former defense attorney, now a law professor, jointly with a former police detective, who tell law students why a lawyer who lets his clients talk to the police is a bad lawyer. The lecture is almost an hour long, and the professor talks really fast, but if you don't have the time or patience to watch it now, save the link and watch it sometime. It could literally save your life.