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Ammonites And Leaping Fish: A Life In Time (2013)

by Penelope Lively(Favorite Author)

3.59 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

024196699X (ISBN13: 9780241966990)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Fig Tree

review 1: I've read several of her novels and one other memoir. She's a very interesting writer. She makes comments that at her age of 80, are insightful and personally helpful. The young person has the years go by so slowly because each one is a large part of their life; we see them go so fast."The stimulus of old age reading...always finding yourself enthusiastic about something you had not expected to like." Her three "desert island" books would be What Maisie Knew, The Inheritors, The Good Soldier. She ends with 6 things in her house that have meaning for her, two of them the Fish and the Ammonites.
review 2: Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir by Penelope Lively was a definite disappointment. Having recently read and appreciated How It All Began. I had expected Liv... moreely’s thoughts and interests to be similar to mine in ways they aren’t. For example, she writes, “Paleontology is awe-inspiring, sobering. Deep time. It puts you in your place—a mere flicker of life in the scheme of things” (208). I don’t disagree, but I also don’t care as she does.Her first focus is “old age,” and although I’m 67, I don’t want to focus on age and infirmity as she does, not because it doesn’t exist and won’t happen to me, but just because I’m not interested in dwelling there. Frequently, too, in this section of the memoir, she brings up things, and then says she’ll write more about them later in the book, a technique/pattern that annoyed me.Perhaps, because of the difference in our ages, nationalities, and life experiences, I shouldn’t have expected to like her favorite books, but I had hoped for titles to add to my reading list. No such luck. The Making of the English Landscape does not entice me at all nor does The Pursuit of the Millennium or The Art of Memory. I don’t think I share her love for history, and I definitely don’t seek out travelogues. She doesn’t either, but even though she emphasizes that she’s “never believed that travel broadens the mind,” she does cite books that emphasize “vicariously (going) up the Amazon, or to the Congo, or Borneo or the North Atlantic” (179).Her conclusion, a description of six important things in her life, was a final letdown. I did learn that an ammonite is a marine invertebrate, but the six items she selects to “reflect interests, and concerns, how they chart where I’ve been, and how I’ve been,” (199) simply amplify the differences between us. less

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