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Dec 17, 2009

Matthew rated it:

It would be interesting to track precisely when Didion went from an essayist of surprise and guts and instinct to a useless "journalist", a neurotic upper-upper-middle-class self-chronicler and collector of the obvious--when she lost heart and became her own problems.

But I read this, often over and over, and fall in love with what she was, even her outsized narcissism and implied cruelties, even her contagion and paranoia, and know that even knowing the reprehensible, shri More...

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Sep 02, 2007

Quinn rated it:

I realize what is disturbing about these essays and what leaves the acrid aftertaste on the leftist tongue about Didion. And I don't think it has much to do with her relatively measured take on the drug-addled Haight-Ashbury scene. For better, but admittedly and sadly often for worse, the radical leftist imagination has been characterized by a willingness and a desire to leap out of our skin into the skin of others, to experience a jump of radical empathy in which the concerns of "they" More...

1 comment like (8 people liked it)

Jul 22, 2011

James K.A. rated it:

I have sort of read Joan Didion backwards, beginning with her masterful memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, and now working my way back to Slouching Towards Bethlehem--one of those books that casts a long shadow over contemporary nonfiction. I picked up this book as a companion for a recent trip back to Los Angeles, both because Didion is one of those rare creatures who is a "native" of California, but also because California figures prominently in these essays. But I became so abs More...

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Mar 27, 2008

Ryan rated it:

This woman writes like I think. When I'm at my most lucid and firing all of my synapses. The essay "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" was as great as I'd heard. "On Self-Respect" was shattering in its clarity--Didion doesn't write about things, the writes them wholly. And the last piece, "Goodbye to All That," about living in NYC, was beautiful at parts. I just hope I don't drown in myself the way she did and have to move.

2 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jul 17, 2008

Jill rated it:

A collection of essays that changed the way I look at writing--tone and syntax particularly. A tough, beautiful book.

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Aug 28, 2008

Patrick rated it:

Everyone I know who reads a lot or considers themselves writers has told me to read Joan Didion. I always cringe and go the other way when too many people tell me to do the same thing. I’m not sure where, or when, this resistance to Didion started. But it has somehow manifested itself in my psyche.

During my first semester at Antioch University, Rob Roberge, in one of his brilliant seminars, made a few comical references to her. Not her writing, but of Didion, or more precisely the c More...

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Dec 26, 2007

blue-collar mind rated it:

Can I tell you I am shocked by those who do not know Joan Didion's writing? And there are lots of these types, I can tell you. Almost no young person under 28 has read her, and I blame the teachers who think (I assume) that she has been over praised, and yet these same teachers struggle with explaining how to spot well-written, clear as bell non-fiction. Easy answer is to assign Didion and let them see it.
Who said essaysists are curmudgeons and have a gift for insight into human behaviou More...

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Mar 12, 2008

Diane rated it:

Joan Didion, where have you been all my life? My husband has been trying to get me to read her books for years, and I see now how blindly stupid I've been in not reading her sooner.

Most of the essays in "Slouching Towards Bethlethem" are wondrous; there were only a few that didn't amaze me. (The piece on the Haight-Ashbury district, for example, dragged on way too long and wasn't as interesting as it would have been when it first appeared in 1967. Similarly, the 1964 piece More...

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Jan 08, 2008

Benjamin rated it:

"In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the bridges were happier than the ones that came later, but perhaps you will see that as we go along. Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots--the Seagram Building fountains disso More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 10, 2008

Alice rated it:

Really? People like Joan Didion? Really? The best thing about this book is the fact that she includes William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming." I'd never read Yeats before and he is amazing!

I always felt like Joan Didion was one of those authors I should read, and she does write lovely, fluid, effortless prose; I'll give her two stars just for that. However, the theme tying these essays together seems to be that things just aren't like they used to be. Didion was only More...

4 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 12, 2008

Josie rated it:

So the question is, "If I read enough San Francisco books, will I start to like San Francisco?" If they're all about hippies, the answer is "no."

I like Joan Didion but sometimes the way in which everything is heightened and so personal is a little juvenile. Like, I like her, so it's ok that everything is about her (or rather, the version of herself that she draws in her writing seems like someone I would like but perhaps not be friends with), but on the other ha More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 07, 2007

Christopher rated it:

This book has meant more to me than almost any other book I have read. I give it four stars only because it is a collection of essays, and not all of them are 5-star. The ones that are though (in particularly "On Keeping a Notebook" and "Goodbye to All That") penetrate and reveal truths about life that applied to me in college, that still apply to me now, and that I know will apply when I am 60. Essentially, Didion hits at the universal with some of the most well-crafted sent More...

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Oct 22, 2011

Jena rated it:

This is my first time reading Joan Didion and I love her writing. Her style is beautiful, clear. I love how her essays are about her observations in the world. I especially loved "On Keeping a Notebook" and "John Wayne: A Love Song."

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 25, 2011

Mason rated it:

A word of advice; don’t read Didion before you go to sleep. Or first thing in the morning. Or on a day when you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you. Her words will follow you around, and once they’re lodged in your brain, well, good luck doing anything else but contemplating them over and over again. These essays won’t be everyone’s cup of tea; they are piercing, often brutal distillations of the author’s social anxiety—Didion pours all of her insecurities about herself and the world at large More...

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Nov 15, 2011

Eli rated it:

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a series of essays by Joan Didion which depict her experiences relating to the Haight-Ashbury district during the counterculture movement. Didion's nonfiction essays are insightful because they not only illuminate her own personal discoveries, but also relate to us some universal truths in what she believes. She writes, "I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherw More...

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Jul 06, 2011

Emma rated it:

Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) is a collection of essays written by 'new new journalist' Joan Didion. Mainly, the essays focus on her experiences in California during the 60s. Taking its title from the poem The Second Coming by Yeats, the title essay (a truly great read) relays Didion's thoughts and findings of the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during its 'golden years' as the countercultural centre of the world.

Didion shows a rather bleak portrayal of the beat lifestyl More...

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Feb 25, 2011

Spotsalots added it

The essays here are of variable interest, one's reactions will presumably go according to one's personal interests and history. The style, which I gather some like and some don't, is spare, individual, and compelling. Now, when I say the style is compelling, I don't mean that it always succeeds in making the topic at hand interesting or in winning the reader over to the author's point of view, but I do think it persuades one to read on, in order to see what comes next.

In a sense it see More...

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Oct 17, 2010

Ben rated it:

I don't read a lot of collections of personal essays, and when I do, I'm a fairly harsh critic. I liked this book quite a bit, though; broken up into three sections ('Life Styles in the Golden Land,' 'Personals,' 'Seven Places of the Mind'), Didion essentially groups these essays by subject. These include arguably 'objective' journalistic pieces with a focus on well-known people and phenomena in California, more abstract essays regarding the author's own feelings on subjects such as keeping a no More...

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Sep 15, 2010

Emily added it

Back in May, in an Essay Mondays post, I kicked myself for waiting so long acquaint myself with the wonders of Joan Didion's writing. After that post I lost no time in acquiring Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a classic collection of her early investigative reporting and personal examinations published in magazines from the early to late 1960s; and having now read it, my admiration for Didion has only increased.

The bulk of the collection consists of mood pieces featuring the Californ More...

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Jan 14, 2010

March rated it:

Joan Didion is becoming something of a new favorite. I first learned her name from a favorite-books list shared by The New Yorker contributor Susan Orlean on stackedup.tv. Slouching Towards Bethlehem was in her “stack” so I checked if the Leiden University Library didn’t have it by any chance. They did, and what a treat it is!
Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays written in the 1960s, as contributions to various American magazines like New York Times Magazine, Vogue and The More...

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Feb 20, 2011

Jessica rated it:

I've always read Didion's essays in isolation. Reading straight through a collection was a revelation and a treat. Some essays, like "Goodbye to All That" are old friends now - each time I read them I am impressed at how they remain relevant not only in 2011, but on the fourth or fifth read. Indeed, many of these essays are very much alive--they change and grow with time and with the passing of my own life. Each reading reveals more. That said, it was also intriguing to read Didi More...

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May 12, 2010

Claire rated it:

At her best, DIdion, in this collection of short nonfiction pieces, creates a detailed and compelling tribute to her home state of Califonia like Sufjan Stevens celebrates Illinois (...in the Illinois album). If you don't know what I'm talking about, I like the Illinois album and parts of Didion's book because they do such a good job at presenting little snapshots of different aspects of a place and its history in a really fresh, beautiful, simple way. I loved when Didion addressed questions lik More...

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Mar 24, 2009

Annie rated it:

My writing teacher assigned the essay "On Keeping a Notebook" to us, and instead of just reading that I read the entire collection cover to cover. Joan Didion is a writer's writer, someone whose very word choice conjures envy. The way she weaves so many different narratives, moments, and voices into one coherent work - a work that appears to be mere pastiche, but is actually much deeper - shows so many lessons to be learned.

True, some of the essays are a bit dated, but I st More...

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Feb 13, 2009

Eric rated it:

Slouching Toward Bethlehem features Didion's snarky but self-effacing prose slashing through vapid hippie rhetoric, swooning over John Wayne, and, often, turning inward to reflect on her searching twenties. What emerges from the essays as a whole is a personality, steady and powerful, a logical place for keen perceptions and conservative politics to take root.

When Didion looks at the counterculture movement of the 60s, she sees not a revolution but Neverland, a country of lost child More...

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Sep 09, 2008

Kate rated it:

I read this last year and recently re-read (and re-read) several of the essays. I can't recommend the essay "Goodbye to All That" enough: particularly for friends who experienced some shift in their lives in their late-twenties, early-thirties. It's beautifully written.

The other essays are very evocative of California, and of "that time" - the late-1960s in San Francisco, the early-1960s in the rural southwest, etc. Some were great and some were just good.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 22, 2009

Nora rated it:

I like Joan Didion... and now I want to leave Oregon and move to California, though wonder if my staunch New Englandness can truly make such a move with comfort or a modicum of ease or will I simply feel like a foreigner, like a spy sent from a far to see how the other side lives and to debunk the mythology I created growing up back east of California? I am a New Englander, truly; in many ways the puritanical pragmatism is ingrained in my bones and is the tendency I fall back upon despite valia More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Nov 07, 2011

Guy rated it:

I've read A Year of Magical thinking and I wasn't a fan. However, I did like an essay Didion wrote "On Writing" and a couple of others, but in this collection, to me, she came across condescendingly in nearly every essay. She says in the preface that "writers are always selling somebody out," and while I recognize that as truth, the first time I read it, I immediately thought that while it was a bad thing, it was also an inevitable truth. (xiv) It's the price a writer must pa More...

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Aug 05, 2011

Garrett rated it:

This book was lent to me by a coworker who insisted that Didion has a great, unflinching voice in which you cannot ignore. Come to find out, I completely agree. Truth is, I had never heard of Didion before, but to read this book in that state made it seem even better. While I am still unfamiliar with Didion's other works, I can safely say that in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion hits a stroke of genius with her social commentary, with her views of the world around her. It's easy to see th More...

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Dec 15, 2010

Lisa rated it:

When I was feeding my mother's cat over Thanksgiving I liberated this from her shelves, an ancient copy that one of my best friends (who is still one of my best friends) gave me in high school -- it's inscribed "Lovely Lisa Meter Maid, where would I be w/o you?" and has as a bookmark a postcard I wrote to another high school friend but never sent, thick with all sorts of stupid private jokes and code words. Since today is Joan Didion's birthday and since I don't have the attention span More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Feb 22, 2010

Lauren rated it:

It seems as though folks either love Joan Didion or they *really* don't. I'm somewhere in the middle. As was the case with The White Album, I really connected with some of her essays but also found myself repelled by others. Perhaps I should better try to view her as a product of her era/generation, but any mention of race or sexual orientation in her writing leaves me cold. It's as though I can feel her heterosexual white privilege positively dripping from the page. But in other places, su More...

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