After The Falls: Coming of Age In The Sixties by Catherine Gildiner ✔✔✔

I requested this book through Inter-Library Loan - I'm glad I didn't purchase it, because I didn't find it as engaging as Too Close To The Falls.  It certainly illustrates coming of age in the sixties, though - alienation from her father, teenage angst, discovering the facts of life in a thoroughly terrifying manner, trying marijuana, having her first relationship, her jobs throughout high school, her involvement in the Civil Rights movement, and later a brush with SNCC, the more radical group, the unhappy ending of a long-term relationship.

Her relationship with her father was probably the focus of the book, beginning with their move to Boston because of losing his business, his trying to deal with her discovering "boys", his later illness, with the necessity of her taking away his driver's license, and then his death.  Yet through it all, she has a high regard for her father, and her comments about the relationship between her parents indicates he was a good man, a good citizen.

There are some interesting stories - the party where she and a friend witnessed a gang rape through a closet door, her being sent to New York City to speak to various organizations about her prize-winning essay, as well as the incident which prompted the essay in the first place.  Just not as many belly laughs as the first one, and frankly some of her adventures were so "out there" I wondered if they were actually true.

We learned in her first book that her mother died of cancer, and this was never alluded to in this segment, so I'm assuming there'll be another memoir.  I'll read it - but maybe re-read the first one before I start it.

I Am My Father's Son - a memoir by Dan Hill ✔✔✔

Dan Hill was here in KL as part of our conert series, and I purchased this memoir there.  He is a great story-teller, and this memoir certainly illustrated that.  He has been tremendously influenced by his father - a charismatic rights activist - all his life, trying to live up his father's expectations as well as carving his own way in life, a path that didn't always meet with his father's approval.  His father was certainly a larger-than-life presence, and his mother suffered from depression, but Dan himself doesn't come across as being easy to have around either!  A good read, and I'll share it with others who attended the concert.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson ✔✔✔✔

A novel by Kate Atkinson is an item I don't hesitate to download to my Kindle.  I was hoping this would be another Jackson Brown detective novel, but instead it was a time-shifting novel, so I found it a ittle hard to get into, but I have such devotion to this author's writing that I kept reading, and was very glad I did.  I didn't know what was happening occasionally, because of the time shifting, but that's the way life is, after all.

I'm quoting from the book desription on Kindle:

"What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you got it right?
During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can draw her first breath.
During the same snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale.
This is Ursula Todd, and her story of life after many deaths - a loop of lives, or the continuous circle of destiny - life after life after life."

The narrative unfolds around historical events in England from World War I through World War II - and Ursula's role in them. Especially interesting was her life as a warden throughout the Blitz of London - I had a little more trouble with her friendship with Eva Braun, Hitler's mistress, probably because of the way the reader is just airlifted, it seems, into the centre of the story.  But the book is well-written, and could probably bear another reading, if only to dissect her structure - it was extremely inventive - nearly every chapter is a new year, say 1910, then 1936, then 1926, and so on.  Events in one section are seen from a different angle in another section, or in another year.  It sounds tremendously complex, but Atkinson, a Scottish writer by the way, handles it very well.

Strongly recommended!

Too Close To The Fallls by Catherine Gildiner ✔✔✔✔

I've been thinking about this book for a long time - I believe I heard Gildiner, who is a practising psychologist in Toronto, reading an excerpt from her sequel to this particular memoir, entitled After the Falls - and finally downloaded it to my Kindle, where it has sat for about a year or more.

Since reading Dickens, I've been somewhat anchorless in my reading.  I tried A Tale Of Two Cities, and I do intend to finish it, but there were several others, too, which I attempted but didn't find them speaking to me at all.  I usually flow from one book to the next and I really didn't know why this gap in my reading had occured.  I still don't, but I did decide that going back to non-fiction was probably best, so I picked up Too Close To The Falls, and was instantly captivated.

Catherine grew up  in Lewiston, New York, which is very close to Niagara Falls. Her father was a busy and highly-respected druggist there, her mother was - well, a very different mother - and Catherine seems to have raised herself, even though she had a close relationship with both her parents.  A family doctor thinks Catherine doesn't have enough to do - she's almost ADD, so her Dad puts her to work at the drugstore when she's only four, and this is the first chapter of the book.

The book is her story, of course, but she has a complete chapter for various colorful people in Lewiston, including Roy, her driver when she's delivering prescriptions, her mother, Sister Agnese, as well as some of her friends.  Many times I was laughing so hard I cried - for example, Catherine writes about Elvis' first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, how the sisters told them all it would be a sin to watch him, which only made it even more intruiging, and then how Sullivan announced prior to the show that Elvis would be televised from the waist up only , so the sisters told them they could watch the show with their parents.  So Catherine's watching the show and telling everyone how Elvis is "sinning from the waist down" - she hasn't figured out what sin is anyway, but wants to appear knowledgeable for her guests.

And this was what was so captivating about the book - she's so innocent, and knows absolutely nothing about most things, so it's her reaction to events and people that is so humorous. And she also has a very inoocent approach to matters of faith, and is constantly the despair of the nuns and priests - absolutely irreverent!

I'm looking forward to the sequel - I do know her mother died quite young, so I think the book will focus on that. This was one of the best memoirs I've read since A Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.

Unusual Uses For Olive Oil - Alexander McCall Smith

This was a very light read and quick to get through, which was nice after David Copperfield's 1100 pages!  Olive Oil is the 4th novel in the Professor von Igelfeld series - McCall Smith describes it as an "entertainment novel" and that it was.  Just a turn of phrase is enough to send me into minutes of laughter, as von Igelfeld, author of the eminently respectable, highly intellectual and highly-prized bestseller: Portuguese Irregular Verbs, gets himself into one scrape or another. von Igelfeld has two rather obnoxious colleagues - Prof. Unterholzer and the librarian Herr Huber, who always talks about his aunt in the nursing home - and life is not made easier for von Igelfeld with these two men, but certainly the reader is richer for having met them! von Igelfeld is a rather Walter Mitty-like character himself, and that is his charm. The series is also a gentle poke at academia and the somewhat fuzzy-headed professors who spend their days there.  A good read, lots of laughs, and - as always with McCall Smith - well-written.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

I re-read this 1100 page novel in preparation for April's book club theme.  I was reading Jane Smiley's "Charles Dickens" when I realized I really should read him,too.  Now I must have taught this novel somewhere along the way, or studied it, because the characters were very familiar - David, Peggotty, Steerforth, Dora, Agnes Wickfield et al.  I enjoyed the novel more as an older adult, and constantly marvelled at the complexity of the writing, the fact that it was serialized, and that Dickens wrote this in long-hand!

After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family 1968 to the present by Randy Taraborelli

I've long been a fan of the Kennedy's and this book brought me up-to-date on the family's many mishaps and adventures over the past 40-odd years. Most recently, there was John Jr's death on a flight to Hyannisport, so there were details about that, as well as Jackie's marriage to Onassis, her life after his death, the problems of Joan Kennedy, the children of Ethel and Bobby Kennedy, who had so many problems with drugs, womanizing, etc.

It was very informative, though quite long.  So what did I learn?  I'd forgotten Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter for the presidential nomination bid for Carter's second term ( which of course, Carter lost to Reagan), how Jackie was the strong, wise woman in the family and maintained her ties to that family, that the Jackie-Jack marriage was a good one, despite his womanizing, that the entire family is extremely close, that Eunice was a bitch and Pat was an alcoholic, that Ted and his son Ted Jr. hit on women together, that Maria Shriver is Democrat and old Arnold is Republican,  that Carolyn Bessette was so much like Jackie, and that the family never ever truly recovered from those assassinations back in the sixties.