A review by snugent730
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

challenging informative reflective medium-paced

4.5

Wow I’m blown away by Joan Didion and can’t believe it’s taken me 30 years to read this collection of nonfiction essays from various publications, often reflecting on various Californian escapades documenting drugs and rise of counterculture in the sixties to her own personal essays. Didion’s prose is incredible—I found myself highlighting so many evocative turns of phrase and raw descriptions of her surroundings & herself. She puts her own mark into everything she writes, propelling a journalistic trend also popularized by Tom Wolfe of putting the author right in the center of the story. It’s said she studied Hemingway typing out his sentences on her typewriter to learn the sentence structure and how much to give and it totally shows her style is both minimalist but deeply affecting. I was really blown away by her writing (I mean Duh but still). So many allusions and words to look up—I annotated my physical copy, something I haven’t done since college lit courses and it was wonderful. Many themes throughout the essays of perception vs. reality and how we delude ourselves on what we pronounce we believe/want and our true desires and bottom line. And how at the end of the day people’s perception is their reality, regardless of intent. Her musings feel just as relevant today as they were in 1961. Opens with Yeats “The Second Coming” one of my favorite poems and where she gets the title of the novel. This books makes me feel both wistful and utterly fascinated by a state I have never ventured, California, which you feel like you know from all of the lore, but Didion ascribes as an almost biblical innate place of being, full of both wonder and cultural decay & destruction. Her last essay “goodbye to all that” on loving and then leaving New York is also incredible. “It’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” Some stories grabbed me more than others but would def recommend and I’m excited to read more of her.