I think I first got a copy of Angela's Ashes as a gift from one of my seniors in my Canadian high-school 12 years ago. I then handed it over to one of my juniors without reading it. And ever since I kept on finding it, unsurprisingly, in all sorts of second-hand bookshops. I think the copy I ended up reading was coming from the Stratford Books for Free, but I might be wrong. Anyway, as I am now finally running out of paperbacks so I decided it was time for me to read this.
And it was, well, alright. Some parts of it were positively interesting and entertaining, in particular when young Frank starts to find a way to make money, but the novelty of some others wore off rather quickly (I understand the author’s life was marked by his father’s alcoholism, but hundreds of pages of stories centred on various stages of drunkenness bored me a bit after a while).
I’ve read that a number of people questioned the truthfulness of the account, but I don’t really see the need for that. After all these are childhood memories, and if I think back to my own childhood I distinctly remember having tamed a lion in the mean streets of Bra, Italy, having arm-wrestled (and won) against Olympic athletes at the peak of their fitness, and having read the Odyssey in its original version when I was 5. But I might have got some of the details a bit wrong…
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