Book dancing fish and ammonites analysis

And Abe books would founder without me Ahhhhh Life and Times chronicled major political events and social change experiences of Lively s life Our life is shaped by the times in which we live and to the extent those events touch our life for Lively growing up in Egypt the Suez Canal was a major milestone in shaping her political sensibility whereas WWII felt quite remote for her Lively is of my parents generation so many of her rumination were quite interesting to me She also got me thinking of how having family in East Berlin gave a greater immediacy to me to Cold War tensions The Vietnam War was my college years and like her I m trying to reconcile what I lived with and what had been written and is being seen through the Lens of time now.

Literature Fiction Dancing Fish and ammonites

Anyone s but to accord it considerable respect Memory is fertile ground for novelists I loved her chapter on Reading and Writing One of my favorite lines is I can measure out my life in books They stand along the way like signposts the moments of absorption and empathy and direction and enlightenment and sheer pleasure I know I will be returning to this section again and again pencil in hand Wouldn t that be an interesting personal timeline the signposts of books read from day 1I know my first three Her last section is titled Six Things and fascinated me for what they told about her life and interests and her character Then it challenged me to consider what six things I might select I have friends downsizing to smaller living accommodations and I m appalled at how easily they rid themselves of their books but would one book become my talisman And what other objects might define me I m still working on that She can be quite funny I ve never believed travel broadens the mind.

Book dancing fish and ammonites summary

Years ago Penelope Lively surprised me with Moon Tiger a fine autobiographical exploration of the past by a rather eccentric and unreliable female narrator It seemed to me that Lively had made it her trademark in literature to explore the vigour and reality of the past because the theme is also dealt with in other books of her This booklet she wrote at the age of 80 in her own modest style not as a memoir but as a view from old day She muses about the passing of time faster as you get older the inconveniences and challenges of aging but also the benefits of becoming slightly invisible and especially the blessing of memory as an instrument for travelling through the past But above all she opens a perspective on old age as a kind of liberating phase in life I think there is a sea change in old age a metamorphosis of the sensibilities With those old consuming vigours now muted something else comes into its own an almost luxurious appreciation of the world that your are still in Spring was never so vibrant autumn never so richly gold Lively recalls personal memories quite jumpy and random she dwells for a long time on the bliss of reading it frees me from the closet of my own mind Reading fiction I see through the prism of another person s understanding reading everything else I am travelling and brings a nice ode to books Maybe Lively opens a lot of open doors and offers no than some musings that will mainly be enjoyed by the fans but oh well she does so with style And last but not least she reminds us of her most important lesson in life that the past really exists is real in our lives if only in the form of a few ancient earthenware plates with leaping fish on it The past is irretrievable but it lurks It sends out tantalizing messages coded signals in the form of a clay pipe stem a smashed wine bottle Two leaping fish from twelfth century Cairo I can t begin to understand what that time was like or how the men who made them lived but I can know that it all happened that old Cairo existed and a particular potter To have the leaping fish sherd on my mantelpiece and all those other sherds in the cake tin expands my concept of time There is a further dimension to memory it is not just a private asset but something vast collective resonant And all because fragments of detritus survive and I can consider them Literature Fiction A beautiful memoir of aging reading writing family history Penelope Lively sat down to write about the things that have been most important to her She was 80 at the time of writing and although her body is breaking down and often painful her mind is as sharp as ever and as she says memory is the mind s triumph over time She has the same wish as me in her time remaining that her eyes continue to serve her because losing the ability to read would be the worst tragedy she can imagine. Book dancing fish and ammonites pdf I really enjoyed this entire book but her first chapter Old Age is a work of art At least to someone like me who is not too far from entering that country myself I ve read some of her fiction but now would like to read some also her memoir of her childhood in Egypt Oleander Jacaranda The best books always do this leave you wanting Literature Fiction I wondered if I was a fraud of some sort for wanting to read the memoir of a writer for whom I actually haven t read any of her books I ve hovered around her intrigued by her novels when I worked with them in the bookstore but failed until now to actually commit to one. Dancing Fish and Ammonites booklet But I m glad to have read her memoir before exploring her backlist Although as she says This is not quite a memoir Rather it is the view from old age Although the structure feels just a bit cobbled together I mean this in only the most positive way The sections in my ARC provided by Penguin Viking are labeled Old Age Life and Times Memory Reading and Writing Six Things In each section she skillfully blends social history with her own history and her involvement in and feelings about the events Old Age for example includes her very personal perspectives about both the positive and negative effects of aging and also the broader context of Britain s and the world s aging populations and how elderly people have been viewed through time by different cultures I loved her insights into how the elderly are often perceived by the younger generations saying that while it s easy for an older person to get caught in the loop of commiserating on their own lives and stories the reality is that they are still here with us and should strive to be a part of what is actually happening around them in real time and real life. Literature fiction dancing fish and ammonites stories Since my copy is an ARC I can t really quote Lively s insights in my review which is the first time with an ARC that this restriction has truly frustrated me I ve worked around this before but her observations are so insightful and so cleverly formed one wants to quote from her endlessly to make sure that her brilliance is best imparted. Dancing fish and ammonites book club questions Lively s writing is intelligent elegant affecting Although I d hoped that Reading and Writing would relate of her day to day techniques for writing her stories I was easily mollified by her revelations of books that have inspired influenced and shaped her own writing I am now walking away not only with a list of her novels to check out but also books and authors I m only vaguely familiar with or haven t even heard of which is saying a lot for me that I d like to explore based on her illuminating descriptions and patronage. Book dancing fish and ammonites review My favourite section of the book is the final one Six Things In this she presents six seemingly random objects from her home and explains their provenance their effect on her life why they re her favourite things Photographs are included This is where the title comes from one object is an ancient Egyptian sherd yes sherd not shard a broken piece of pottery on which two small black fish dance Another is a pebble of blue lias inset with two spiraled fossilized ammonites She balances such ancient treasures with common objects like the duck kettle holders from Maine These lovingly described objects made me think about those items that I personally have chosen to keep around despite a tendency in the last decade to ruthlessly cull my own possessions to a minimum Some are also potential treasures in the minds of others but some are trinkets valued only by myself because of my emotional history with them. Pdf dancing fish and ammonites lesson plan well just sort of For me the book is OK rather than good so I am giving it two stars Early in the book is written the following about being a widow It is an entirely changed life for anyone who has been in a long marriage 41 years for Lively and 30 days short of 50 years for me Alone in bed Alone most of the time without that presence toward which you turned for advice reassurance with whom you shared the good news and the bad Every decision now taken alone No one to diffuse anxieties and a thoroughly commonplace experience Everywhere Always So get on with it and don t behave as if you are uniquely afflicted Having recently lost my husband to a severe heart attack this spoke to me This is exactly how I feel I recognize the admonition given to be correct The book is a blend of different topics The author speaks of being old she wrote the book at the age of eighty It is also autobiographical she speaks of her youth in Cairo her move to relative safety back in England during the Second World War This was when she was a teen She writes of the Suez Crisis in October 1956 the Brits were bombing her home Now she s twenty three She speaks of living with her two grandmothers in England of her love of reading of the value and importance of reading Many many books are named Rather than simply naming lots of books I wish she had mentioned fewer but had thoroughly explained why each one was of importance to her She shows how hers and other people s lives are shaped by history and the era in which they live I totally agree The problem is that the book goes in all different directions Sometimes it reads as a history book Other times as a self help book Sometimes it is autobiographical The author goes off on tangents some of which I found boring For example when she speaks pf objects in her home that mean a lot to her The objects do tell us about who she is but the details concerning her sampler collection her Jerusalem Bible her cat statue simply fail to interest me By the way Lively is an agnostic. Book dancing fish and ammonites summary There are good linesbut Lively has a tendency to write in one word sentences She says a word names an object that means a lot to her but little to me I need fuller explanations What is obvious to her is not obvious to me. Dancing Fish and ammonitesz I like these lines The past is irretrievable but it lurks Books free me from the prison of myself Libraries favor serendipity In reference to reading You find out what you like by exploring what you do not To read is to experience What is said matters just as much as how it is said I would have turned the sentence around I would emphasize the importance of how something is said. Book dancing fish and ammonites in the ocean The book goes off in different directions It doesn t hold together properly Some sections are interesting others less so How It All Began 2 stars Ammonites and Leaping Fish A Life in Time 2 stars Moon Tiger 3 stars Literature Fiction I like Penelope Lively I enjoy her thoughtfulness apparently in any form It was written when she was eighty years old Her age takes a significant amount of space in the narrative and gives the book a perspective that perhaps is not appreciated by everyone Dancing fish and Ammonites is not a book to read for the virtues of the plot It is not a biography either It reveals bits and pieces about its author in bypassing through some not particularly chronological episodes or through her musings about this and that I enjoyed it a lot and it strengthens my suspicion that I might like everything and anything that she has ever written Literature Fiction I began on a spring morning in the Anglo American Hospital in Zamalek which was a residential suburb on Gezira the island in Cairo s Nile 17 March 1933 Elsewhere things were going on that would lead to turmoil in North Africa in a few years time my parents lives would be affected and mine but they were comfortably oblivious that morning and I was tucked up in a crib the feet of which stood in tin trays of water because there had been instances of ants getting at newborn babies. Book dancing fish and ammonites summary Towards the end of my own stint I find myself thinking less about what has happened to me but interested in this lifetime context in the times of my life I have the great sustaining ballast of memory we all do and hope to hang on to it I am interested in the way that memory works in what we do with it and what it does with us And when I look around my cluttered cluttered house ballast material ballast I can see myself oddly identified and defined by what is in it my life charted out on the bookshelves my concerns illuminated by a range of objects. Dancing Fish and ammonitesz I have no idea why but Penelope Lively s book seems to go by various titles Another one seems to be Ammonites and Leaping Fish A Life in Time which is a bit confusing when you re trying to find the book but at the same time makes it really easy to tell someone else what the title is because inevitably any one of the variations on the title may bring up the book in a search Leaping Fish Dancing Fish at least the Ammonites seem to be present in all of them. Book dancing fish and ammonites summary Anyway this book is my RL book club s read for this month and it is the first of their picks that I have really enjoyed It is not a perfect book but I was glued to Lively s essays on ageing memory her own story her accounts of history and her musings on life on reading. Dancing Fish and Ammonites ebook As it turns out she seems to be an author that I share some interests with and whose thought process I find both inspiring and not easy to follow exactly but neatly cutting to salient points without a lot flourish What I mean is she gets to the point I like that You aren t going to get old of course when you are young We won t ever be old partly because we can t imagine what it is like to be old but also because we don t want to and crucially are not particularly interested We are too keen to bundle everyone by category as a child I used to be maddened by the assumption that I would get along famously with someone just because we were both eight All that we have in common we in this new demographic are our aches and pains and disabilities and yes that high C evoked by Anthony Burgess For the rest of it we are the people we have always been splendidly various and let us respect that Whether it were her thoughts on old age or her dissection of the Suez Crisis which btw I found particularly fascinating in that horrifying way that history has when it becomes clear just how stupid and reckless politicians are when gambling with people s lives or her description of how much she loves reading and how books are part of her life Right on Penelope I will be returning to this book to re read certain sections Can t garden Don t want to travel But can read must read For me reading is the essential palliative the daily fix Old reading revisiting but new reading too lots of it reading in all directions plenty of fiction history and archaeology always reading to satisfy perennial tastes reading sideways too try her try him try that and AbeBooks would founder without me my house is a book depository books in books out to family and friends to my daughter s Somerset cottage where there is still some shelf space to wonderful Book Aid which sends English language books to places where they are needed. Book dancing fish and ammonites summary This her memoir does not stick to that prescribed architecture of beginning middle end with a relevant flow of narrative It is a memoir in a way but certainly not anything that could be referred to for chronology In this book Lively dissects topics old age memory the individuals place in collective history and connects them to her own life. Pdf dancing fish and ammonites lesson plan Her narrative in this book very much reminded me of that of Claudia in Lively s book Moon Tiger who exclaims the following at the beginning of the book I m writing a history of the world she says And the hands of the nurse are arrested for a moment she looks down at this old woman this old ill woman Well my goodness the nurse says That s quite a thing to be doing isn t it And then she becomes busy again she heaves and tucks and smooths Upsy a bit dear that s a good girl then we ll get you a cup of tea Penelope Lively Moon Tiger It is messy in parts Yet I actually found that aspect charming Others may not. Dancing fish and ammonites ebook download Am I envious of the young Would I want to be young again On the first count not really which surprises me On the second certainly not if it meant a repeat performance I would like to have back vigour and robust health but that is not exactly envy And having known youth I m well aware that it has its own traumas that it is no Elysian progress that it can be a time of distress and disappointment that it is exuberant and exciting but it is no picnic I don t particularly want to go back there And in any case I am someone else now This seems to contradict earlier assertions that you are in old age the person you always were What I mean is that old age has different needs different satisfactions a different outlook I remember my young self and I am not essentially changed but I perform otherwise today Literature Fiction After reading Dancing Fish and Amonites I feel like I ve been on a retreat for a few days with an especially erudite friend talking the days away while taking a ramble on this or that trail enjoying cups of tea and perhaps a glass of wine or two by the fire as we share our histories and thoughts on life There is an intimacy as well as the intelligence of an ever questing mind that makes this book irresistible to me. Dancing Fish and ammonitesz Lively has written memoirs before but this is her view from old age written when she was eighty She has divided the book into lengthy sections each exploring an aspect of old age Old Age is the first longest and I think me favorite but ask me tomorrow and I may say Memory or Life and Times are my favorite I think I ve already read the book at least one and a half timesit is heavily annotated by me after all I was engaged in a dynamic conversation Naturally as a highly literate historian as well as author the book abounds in quotes and references She had the long view and reminds us how as recently as 1960 there were few who reached the age of 100 Gasp indeed at the statistic that by 2060 it is predicted there will be over 400000 people over a 100 in Britain alone Sociological changes aside Lively explores many of the changes in her own life Can t garden Don t want to travel But can read must read For me reading is the essential palliative the daily fix I am hoping like her that my eyes and mind hold out I laughed when I read her enthusiastic new reading too lots of it reading in all directions plenty of fiction history archaeology always reading to satisfy perennial tastes reading sideways too try her try him try that e. Dancing Fish and ammonitesz g In Ken Burns current series on Vietnam In my forties I really wanted to hear nothing about it a kind of been there done that Now I m readyIn the second half of Time and Place she explores social change The seismic changes of the past fifty years were feminism the pill sexual candor and homosexuality The unstoppable slide toward entire permissiveness to a climate in which nothing is unmentionable and most of it is mentioned all the time And where will we go next The memory that we live with the formof memory that most interests me is the moth eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around depends on It is our ID this is how we know who we are and where we have been Memory oh my gosh isn t that the word we jest about for decades before we actually are old Isn t that where we wonder if our sibling or our spouse was really present because their memory of that special event differs so greatly from ours Lively gives some interesting scientific info here and addresses the current plague of dementia but mostly explores how thinking about the distortions of memory has influenced several of the novels she has written in Moon Tiger and The Photograph She writes I have learned to be suspicious of memory my own having known some well travelled minds that were nicely atrophied In the company of Penelope Lively there is no chance of your brain atrophying She has always extended my experiences Highly recommended Literature Fiction I learned Penelope Lively s three favourite novels are What Daisy Knew by Henry James The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford and The Inheritors by William Golding I d like to say I learned lots of interest from Lively but I m afraid I didn t I was often rather bored by her musings in this book of rather disconnected essays I d describe this as a pastime rather than any kind of inspired performance Overall it came across as a writer writing for the sake of it I ve got a lot of love for Penelope Lively but this felt like a waste of my time Literature Fiction Grey PowerOur idea of a person derives from the ancient Greek conceept of the prosopon the mask worn by actors in the theatres of Attica The Romans litigious folk that they were put this idea to work in law Persona for them was a legal designation of an entity with status to appear on his sic behalf in legal proceedings There were only two such persons in Roman law the Emperor and the paterfamilias head of the family A person therefore was a highly constrained and tightly defined and controlled role a social mask with a range of fixed obligations and duties In brief a person was a slave to society a productive conventional recognized cog in the cultural wheel And so it has remained Penelope Lively s wonderfully rambling meditation on old age makes a profoundly important point Old age quite apart from its aches pains and progressive organ failures is a liberation from that social peonage of personhood Advanced age than compensates for its inconveniences by eliminating this stigma Because the old are hardly noticed in a culture of youth we are able to drop our pretenses about who we are and how we fit in We fly under the radar of society Because we have lost our vigour we are no longer expected to have ambitions or to visibly contribute to the well being of the world So we are left alone to do the things we ve wanted to do all along In advanced societies we are condescended to as at least slightly debilitated which entitles us to special privileges putting us in exempt categories for things from theatre tickets to bus passes to television licenses to prescriptions which we exploit to the hilt. Dancing Fish and Ammonites epubs air That is the old enter into the glorious status of non person This gives us power that the young can t even imagine I find that age has bestowed a kind of comfortable anonymity. Literature fiction dancing fish and ammonites in literature We are not exactly invisible but we are not noticed says Lively Oh blessed impersonal existence One becomes almost spiritualized The point here is that age may sideline but it also confers a sort of neutrality you are no longer out there in the thick of things but able to stand back observe consider To be a judge and not be judged This is indeed power. Literature fiction dancing fish and ammonites in literature The power is also psychological Experience is not simply and accumulation of memories it is also a successive construction of personalities As Lively knows This old age self is just a top dressing it seems early selves are still mutinously present getting a word in now and then I never imagined that old age would be quite like this possibly because like most I never much bothered to imagine it Perhaps this is the real breakthrough of old age to arrive at the realization that whatever we are its not what we ve thought much less what anyone else has thought We have depth We exude ambivalence We are permanently mysterious To paraphrase Oscar Wilde Yes we contradict ourselves we are manifold And that is our secret power as human beings a sort of senescent magic that dissolves personhood. Literature fiction dancing fish and ammonites in literature Of course while we have individually become non persons we have also assumed a collective political personality This has always been a latent unrecognised consequence of democracy Since we all expect to become part of the constituency of the aged the old have always held the upper hand It is not falling fertility rates but greater longevity that has turned the electoral minds of all but the very young to the economics of living in the end times Lively summarizes the situation laconically The poor have always been with us and now the old are too That presence is sociological as well as demographic a hidden power shepherding in the fellow travelers of the old despite any resentful resistance. Kindle dancing fish and ammonites book review So as Lively says A positive attitude is not going to cure the arthritis or the macular degeneration or whatever but a bit of bravado makes endurance possible But that bravado is certainly not without foundation And as things about power go the power of the old is just about as egalitarian as it gets since we all get to share in it eventually. Dancing Fish and Ammonites booker Not recommended for readers under 70 years of age You just won t get it behind the mask Besides we don t want the secret to get out I should add for the sake of completeness that the idea of person which we inherited has been profoundly affected by Christian theology of the Middle Ages in which each of the Divine Persons of the Holy Trinity are defined solely in terms of their relationships to each other Thus person came to be associated with a complete lack paradoxically of personal substance that is a cipher except in its social context The question it seems to me is Who would aspire to such a constrained and vacuous status Postscript 16Jan18 Another GR reader sent me this apt piece Literature Fiction The subtitle of this book is A Memoir But it is not a memoir in the traditional sense of covering a person s life chronologically In fact the author says in this book that she has no interest in writing that kind of memoir. Dancing Fish and Ammonites epubs air Rather it is a book of musings and reminiscences about her life largely concerned with getting old she was 80 when she wrote this book in 2013 I will be 63 in March so I have to say it was very encouraging to find out that despite her age and a few health issues she still very much enjoys herself. Literature fiction dancing fish and ammonites stories A substantial amount of the book is taken up by her love of reading and the authors that she loved when she was younger and those that she enjoys now Again I was happy to find out that her passion for reading has not diminished with age as reading is probably the biggest part of my life. Dancing fish and ammonites book club questions All in all a very enjoyable book Literature Fiction

Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir By Penelope Lively

0670016551

9780670016556

English

240

Hardcover

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The beloved and bestselling author takes an intimate look back at a life of reading and writing The memory that we live with is the moth eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around depends on It is our ID this is how we know who we are and where we have been Memory and history have been Penelope Lively s terrain in fiction over a career that has spanned five decades But she has only rarely given readers a glimpse into her influences and formative years. Book dancing fish and ammonites summary Dancing Fish and Ammonites traces the arc of Lively s life stretching from her early childhood in Cairo to boarding school in England to the sweeping social changes of Britain s twentieth century She reflects on her early love of archeology the fragments of the ancients that have accompanied her journey including a sherd of Egyptian ceramic depicting dancing fish and ammonites found years ago on a Dorset beach She also writes insightfully about aging and what life looks like from where she now stands Dancing Fish and Ammonites A MemoirPenelope Lively is the author of many prize winning novels and short story collections for both adults and children She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize once in 1977 for her first novel The Road to Lichfield and again in 1984 for According to Mark She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Epub dancing fish and ammonites free Her other books include Going Back Judgement Day Next to Nature Art Perfect Happiness Passing On City of the Mind Cleopatra s Sister Heat Wave Beyond the Blue Mountains a collection of short stories Oleander Jacaranda a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt Spiderweb her autobiographical work A House Unlocked The Photograph Making It Up Consequences Family Album which was shortlis Penelope Lively is the author of many prize winning novels and short story collections for both adults and children She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize once in 1977 for her first novel The Road to Lichfield and again in 1984 for According to Mark She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Book Dancing Fish and ammonites Her other books include Going Back Judgement Day Next to Nature Art Perfect Happiness Passing On City of the Mind Cleopatra s Sister Heat Wave Beyond the Blue Mountains a collection of short stories Oleander Jacaranda a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt Spiderweb her autobiographical work A House Unlocked The Photograph Making It Up Consequences Family Album which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award and How It All Began. Book dancing fish and ammonites book She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year s Honours List and DBE in 2012: EPub Dancing Fish and ammonites Deeply enjoyable witty and with philosophical insights I ll be considering from some time to come Literature Fiction I like this, Literature fiction dancing fish and ammonites in literature The flow of words the prose style doesn t set off a spark for me The writing is pared down simple never wordy Such usually appeals to me but it goes a step too far, Dancing Fish and ammonitesz Did you know that as one gets older one s balance gets worse I did not know this I see this happening to myself and had no idea this has to do with age, Dancing Fish and ammonitesz Anna Bentinck reads the audiobook very well Every word is clearly spoken and she speaks slowly I want time to contemplate that said Four stars for the narration. Dancing fish and ammonites book club questions Despite all my enthusiasm for this book it is not without faults They show up especially when compared to Lively s fiction which has structure as story telling tends to do, Literature fiction dancing fish and ammonites stories Penelope Lively lives in London She was married to Jack Lively who died in 1998 site_link.

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