Your reaction to Atonemen t is quite different from that of many of my friends. They found the book easy to get into, but boring after the 80th page or so. It kind of feels right, from my reading experience of the book, to say that the rest of the book after the first part's implosion amounts to a rather extended "mulling things over." And a whole lifetime spent mulling things over is much, much worse than the one evening poor Scrooge had to endure doing something similar, and hardly fair as holiday fare. No? Link: The Tyee