Weekend Reads

Do you have a book that you spend your life recommending to people? For me that book is Too Close to the Falls by Catherine Gildiner. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve hyped up this memoir.

The thing is, this book doesn’t even look like it’s my vibe – its sepia cover presents like a tame story about an ordinary person. And that’s not what this book is like at all. (What they say is true – you can’t judge a book by its cover.)

Our heroine, Cathy McClure, is an extraordinary girl growing up in a very conventional time and place – Lewiston, a town near Niagara Falls, in the 1950s.

Diagnosed as having an overactive “metronome” (what we would now call ADHD), the family doctor declares the solution to keep young Cathy calm is a job in her dad’s pharmacy – at four years old.

Whether she’s dispensing sleeping pills to Marilyn Monroe (in town to film “Niagara”), losing part of her ear while stuck in a deadly snowstorm (never scratch frostbite!), or causing complete havoc at her conservative Catholic school (stabbing her bully), Cathy is an incredibly endearing character.

Gildiner’s storytelling is like listening to someone fascinating at a dinner party who tells the best stories – you just want to hear more from her. Her writing is unpretentious and conversational, and the scenarios she tells are just so funny.

I particularly love Cathy’s stories about her mother, an amateur historian who refuses to cook (like, ever) and whose reaction to visitors is to yell “Hit the deck!” at which the entire family lies on the floor and pretends not to be home, so they don’t have to receive guests.

The best thing about this book is that Cathy’s story continues, with two more books that follow her up to her college days. So once you finish Too Close to the Calls, you can reach for After the Falls, and then Coming Ashore. And rest assured, Cathy’s life is never boring.

What would you do if you kept dreaming about a woman urging you to board a bus made of rice paper? And then one day (in real life) she walked up to you in a museum and asked why you wouldn’t get on the bus?

Amaryllis Night and Day by Russell Hoban is a love story that takes place mostly in the subconscious. It’s the story of artist Peter and the mysterious Amaryllis, who finds him in a dream – and then teaches him how to “glim”, a kind of lucid dreaming that forms most of their courtship.

This is a playful and unusual story. It’s a short book, but it’s packed with insightful and funny metaphors. Disoriented after he begins having odd dreams, Peter is beset by “the feeling you get when you reach for something on the top shelf of a cupboard and everything falls on your head.” Before his life is enriched with Amaryllis, he sees empty buses and thinks them “Coachloads of emptiness (that) waited for their children to return”, foreshadowing his eventual dreamland coach adventures with his future love.

This whimsical book is a weird but charming love story, and I really liked how unserious it was – and at 176 pages it can easily be demolished in a weekend.