Reset reading: "Life After Life" by Kate Atkinson

If you download an audiobook from iBooks now, it seems, you also get the text version at the same time. (Unless the system glitched on me twice the same day.) Which is interesting, because you can mix your media. I "read" most of Life After Life as an audiobook in the long - but not quite long enough - car trip from Brussels to Rome, but was able to fill in bits by reading a chapter or two on my phone. In case you were wondering, the dual versions were not in sync, so I had to re-find my place when I switched, but I can't imagine that is a feature which will be long coming.

Life After Life is a hefty book, 630 pages in its paperback manifestation, or 15½ hours' listening. It has taken me a while to get round to acting on this at least year-old recommendation by unfailing literary guru, Paola Buonadonna, but it was well worth it. I may as well say it now, Kate Atkinson has bowled me over once again with this extraordinary book.

"What if we had the chance to do it again and again … until we finally get it right?" So observes Teddy, one of the novel's minor, though highly significant characters, expressing the premise on which Life After Life is based. This is a story of alternative outcomes, lived primarily, though by no means exclusively - the history of the world may also change, by Ursula, the third-born of a well-to-do middle class family residing in the still bucolic delights of the Home Counties, just beyond the fringes on London. From the outset, alternative paths are signalled. Her birth, on 11 February 1910, occurs earlier than expected, on a day of severe snow, which prevents both doctor and midwife from attending the mother, Sylvie. Tragically, the baby is born with the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck, and Ursula never even manages to draw breath. Except, in the next scene, the doctor has somehow beaten the snow and is on hand with the vital surgical scissors and Ursula lives. Such alternative scenarios recur over and over again: Ursula's young life is blotted out, always marked with a variant on the phrase "... and darkness fell" on several occasions, only for us to be taken back to 11 February 1910 for the start of another variant on the life, one in which Ursula, never consciously but often guided by a vague hunch, a sense of dread, or what her mother calls déjà vu, avoids her (intended?) fate. 

Rhetorical reading: ", TED Talks: the Official TED Guide to Public Speaking" by Chris Anderson

I'm not quite sure how it happened, but today I realised that my normally rather orderly and linear approach to reading had broken down. I had three books on the go simultaneously, plus clear intent to embark on another (in the form of an audiobook) tomorrow. Chaos! 

 Clearly, there is a need to restore some order, and I trust the upcoming summer holidays will help me achieve this. However, one thing I could do immediately was polish off one which I had come close to finishing, but had been rather distracted from, TED Talks: the Official TED Guide to Public Speaking. There is a reason for my failure to finish this book, which has been on the go since May (possibly even April), namely that I had the impression it was delivering diminishing returns.  However, being rather purist on such matters, I thought I should make the effort to finish a book which had, after all, given me quite a lot along the way. I'm glad I did, by the way, even though I still feel that 80% of this book's value came in the first 20% of its pages. You will note in passing the pleasingly TED-ish quality of this 80/20 rule (which, I discover as I write this, is officially a thing, viz the Pareto Principle).

I am an unashamed fan of TED talks, and will freely admit to harbouring a desire myself to get up on the TED stage one day (though to talk about what, I'm not quite sure). The basic idea behind TED is one that appeals to me immensely, that of, as TED has it, ideas worth sharing. The notion that individuals with special expertise or experience should be given a platform to share their knowledge and ideas with both a live audience and a worldwide public is perhaps not an utterly original one, but the genius of TED has been to combine a fundamentally traditional format - the short spoken presentation - with the power of the internet, and - here's the key - to do so by reviving the most ancient of accomplishments: rhetoric.

Close to home reading: "Putsch" by Julian Priestley

It feels like it has taken a very long time to get round to writing this review. It is bad enough that I read the book nearly a month ago; what is worse is that I had already read the book long before that. The hawk-eyed who download this book from Amazon (at a very reasonable £6.36) will perhaps notice my name in the acknowledgements as a pre-reader - ha! the identity of the mysterious Himoverthere is thus incidentally revealed! - which means the Raphael Sinclair and his accompanying cast of characters have been familiar to me for longer than most.

Perhaps my tardiness can indeed be accounted for by this. Not only is this novel by my friend, mentor and former boss, Julian Priestley, but I also feel some sort of personal stake in the project, at least by association. So whether I can be considered a completely objective reviewer is a moot point. But then, who said the scribblings on this blog were supposed to be "objective reviews" anyway? Nonetheless, what follows will be a shot at talking about Putsch as if new to, and distant from, it, not least because I plan to transplant it later as an Amazon review.

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Putsch proves the point that truth can be as strange as fiction. It must have been slightly galling for the author to see real political events mirroring, occasionally outdoing, the events described in his novel, both just before and just after publication. At the same time, it is a terrific vindication of his insight into the political mood of the times, skittish and combustible, but, as ever, and has we have seen, carried out by ambitious, calculating individuals. 

Without spoiling, Putsch is the story of a former Labour minister, Raphael Sinclair, who together with a clique of bright young ideologues recruited from Oxford, mounts an internal challenge to the leadership of his party, which is in power and which, we understand, bears a close resemblance to the doomed post-Blair regime of Gordon Brown. Sinclair was a rising star, but is now out in the cold, having resigned, a few years earlier, in opposition to the Iraq war.  His trick is to see an opportunity in the general state of political disaffection in the country, which paradoxically generates a pent up appetite for someone who can offer new ideas, new energy, and a genuine perspective for change, all to be delivered with a combination of populist fervour, rigorous organisation, smart communications and a considerable amount of raw cunning. 

Though Sinclair has clearly exhibited himself as a man of principle (the Iraq resignation), the ideology behind his bid for power is left extremely ambiguous. The array of smart youngsters he deploys as the stormtroopers of his insurgency espouse a far-left programme which makes the Labour party of the early 1980s look rather lily-livered, but Sinclair himself, though giving them license to tout their ideas up and down the country, never quite signs on to the whole package. At the end of the book, you are still wondering quite what his game is. Which is of course very much the point.

Authentic reading: "This is How You Lose Her" by Junot Díaz

I am in serious debt to my book blog. It is almost a month since I listened to this (audio)book, and another, highly significant, book has passed since. So it's about time. 

I admit that this book was bought initially on the strength of something as banal as its length. I needed an audio book to accompany me on a drive  from Brussels to Cardiff, so something clocking under about seven hours. After that, the title caught my eye, then a snagged memory of reading a review somewhere recommending it. Hardly a choice based on fastidious literary criteria, but a felicitous one nonetheless. 

It may help that on the recording I bought this book is read by its author. The reader had to be intimate with the language and cadences of the Dominican community transplanted to the US, mostly in rough parts of New Jersey, for that language and those cadences are so much of the power of this short collection of stories. On the page, it might be a struggle, but Díaz brings the sentences to life, giving an authenticity - almost an extra character - to this inside view (told from various interlinking perspectives) of the often harsh life of the immigrants at the bottom of America's food chain. 

At the centre of the stories is a single character, albeit at very different stages of his life, Yunior, transplanted along with his mother and brother from the Caribbean to the unbelievable cold of a New York winter by a father he barely knows. In fits and starts, with some digressions via other characters on the margins of whose stories Yunior still hovers, the life of an individual and a community emerges.