Friday, December 24, 2010

Memories of John Lennon, edited by Yoko Ono

Book 49

I first listed Memories of John Lennon on my LibraryThing page in 2007.  That means I started reading it in 2007.  I put it down because I was (sorry) bored.  It has been sitting on my TBR shelf for three years.

I picked it back up after the anniversary of Lennon's murder, and some of it is really good.  Yoko Ono pulled together a whole ton of stories - vignettes might be a better word - with photographs and sketches from John's friends, colleagues (none of the Beatles, of course) and otherwise famous fans.

Some were really short.  Norman Mailer contributed this:

"We have lost a genius of the spirit."

Bono contributed a sketch of Lennon.  And some people wrote on for days.  The trouble is, so many were saying the same things:  how admired, genius, clever, warm, loving, blahblahblah.  You know what I really liked?  Yoko offered up a story at the end involving an art gallery showing her work and being snubbed in a junior high sort of way and how John Lennon held her hand and kept his chin up and got her through it.  I could have read a whole book full of stories like that.

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