Somewhere Towards the End

Somewhere Towards the End is a memoir by Diana Athill. i liked it a lot!

okay i never heard of her either, but it was on the New Book shelf at the library, somewhere towards the beginning, because her name starts with A. 

i didn't know it won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography and was a New York Times bestseller.

apparently she was one of the great book editors of the twentieth century (sez the cover).

for some reason, i immediately like some books from the first page and dislike others.  it has less to do with the subject matter than with the writing style. 

this was one of those books that i opened to the first page, standing in the library, and decided to take a chance on it.  that doesn't happen with many, even tho you can take a good many chances on library books that you would never take at a book store.  i walked out with 3 or 4 to try out.  read this one right away- to the end!

i've read 1/4 of the s. hawking so far, and probably won't touch the others.

more and more, like my father, i start books and never finishing them.  i remember once he explained that after he read a bit of a book, he knew what it was about and could figure out what was probably going to be said or happen, so he lost interest.

Diana Athill's book kept me guessing. she is around 89 or 90 when she wrote it, and it is not just retelling incidents from her younger days, but also writing about what she does and thinks about now that she is nearing the end. 

as i read it i kept thinking of a friend of mine, who has a similar style, or voice, or something, to her tales of younger days and musings of current days. they both like to analyze life and search out what it's all about.  i'd never tell my friend of this similarity, for she would no doubt disagree quite strongly. heehee that's part of the similarity. but it makes me think she should write for publication, not just for fun, friends, and the internet.