Running in the Family 17

As I started reading Running in the Family the first thing I noticed was the way it was written. Michael Ondaatje, the author, spelled words like behavior and practice, behaviour and practise. My dad use to live in Scotland so I picked up right away that this book was probably written somewhere in England...... or apparently Canada.

This book, so far, does not really appeal to me. Maybe it is because the author uses a lot of pointless detail, or maybe because I do not know where the memoir takes place. When I was reading it, I kept flipping back to the page with the map to see how far each city was from each other. This book seems more comical than the other two. His father, as a teenager, pretended that he was accepted into Cambridge University to steal the tuition from his parents. For the next two and a half years he lived at Cambridge, just never took any classes. This seems it could be the opening of some future comedy movie. Then later in the readings, Ondaatje’s grandmother was sitting on a cramped bus. She was sitting next to two people, to make the seating arrangements more comfortable, the man on her left put his arm around her. He later started touching her breast. She did not even notice until the people across from her started making weird faces. When she saw that he was trying to get to second base with her, she chuckled to herself because she had the breast removed five years earlier. Though some of it was comical, other parts of the readings were boring. “Asia. The name was a gasp from dying mouth. An ancient word that had to be whispered, would never be used as a battle cry. The word sprawled.” This is too much detail to even comprehend what he is talking about. I know I am no writing major and I have never written a book before, but I feel the opening line to this paragraph makes me want to put the book down.