Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays
by Joan Didion
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Read in March, 2008
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 on Holl...more
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 on Holl...more
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"On Self Respect" is a marvelous essay that I go back to again and again (including today) and would benefit anyone by being placed on a bedside table.
"Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that ...more
"Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that ...more
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Read in September, 2007
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&q...more
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Read in December, 2007
Reading this book, it was interesting to see the extent to which Didion's writing has been absorbed into the public fabric. This work hums with an internal vitality, though her writing style does seem a bit played-out, if only because I've been reading authors for years who have been deeply influenced by her writing style.
I found the "Personals" section particularly intriguing. Didion's reflections on herself and her changing outlook really rang true for me, and to my mind stood t...more
I found the "Personals" section particularly intriguing. Didion's reflections on herself and her changing outlook really rang true for me, and to my mind stood t...more
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Read in January, 1968
This book puzzles me. As a native Californian of roughly Didion's age I was completely captured by "Slouching..." when I first read it in 1968. No one had captured by homeland more perfectly. I re-read it this year and it struck me as dessicated and mannered. The culture of the state has changed; I have changed; the essays have stayed the same. Sorry, Joan.
If you are unfamiliar with Didion's austere style, I can do nothing better than give you a paragraph. This is the beginn...more
If you are unfamiliar with Didion's austere style, I can do nothing better than give you a paragraph. This is the beginn...more
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Read in January, 1983
recommends it for:
essayists, activists, those who are tired of careless writing
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 behaviour? (...more
Who said essaysists are curmudgeons and have a gift for insight into human behaviour? (...more
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Read in January, 2008
Her reporting, particularly in the first section of the book, is impeccable-- funny, odd, absorbing. It feels complete for each topic. So the four stars are mainly for the first section. The more personal essays didn't draw me in as much. I sense a "you'd have to be a Californian to understand" attitude, and it's annoying and distancing, even if it probably is the way one would feel visiting the regions she describes. I like that her voice can be smug sometimes, because that makes...more
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recommends it for:
desert people
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, shriveled po...more
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, shriveled po...more
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Read in June, 2007
This book was recommended to me and I feel that I read it at a good time at my life. As in the past, I felt frustrated at times with Didion - the generation gap and differences in our ethnicity and class make our understandings of California quite disparate. Often it was clear we experienced two very different Californias. Still, she is an excellent writer and her perspectives made me want to dialogue with her, made me think of how I would describe the same situations; they even made me occa...more
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Read in January, 2008
"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
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Read in March, 2008
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 in her ...more
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 in her ...more
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I find Joan Didion fascinating. She began as a staunch conservative but was infuriated when Reagen (who she deemed a "false" conservative) overtook the 1964 Republican National Convention.
She now identifies herself with the Democratic party, though she retains much of her conservative bent (particularly on cultural issues). She was part of the wave of "New Journalism."
Didion is brilliant, articulate and insightful.
I don't agree with her on everything, but I appre...more
She now identifies herself with the Democratic party, though she retains much of her conservative bent (particularly on cultural issues). She was part of the wave of "New Journalism."
Didion is brilliant, articulate and insightful.
I don't agree with her on everything, but I appre...more
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oh boy. i really liked this book. thanks sam! i was saying the other day that joan didion really helped me understand why i was so into ayn rand as a highschooler. i was pretty ignorant of rand's economic/social politics, but i was so enamored and obsessed with her female protagonists. and i haven't read anything that was so reminiscent until now. but joan didion is writing about nostalgia and LSD and america and california in the mid-60's, a time that seems so suspended between then and n...more
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I haven't read this entire book, but i really want to. Last summer I went to Central Park to hear Joan Didion read from The Year of Magical Thinking. She began, however, with a reading from Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The essay, "Goodbye to All That," described her arrival to New York City as a young woman. This is the line that felt awfully, eerily familiar--
"That was the year, my twenty-eight, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some thin...more
"That was the year, my twenty-eight, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some thin...more
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I picked up Joan Didion when I was a 17 year old missing home. You wouldn't think a book that casts such a negative view on my hometown would stick with me, but every essay in this is pure gold. Didion's tone is occasionally difficult to swallow, especially in lengthy doses. This is doubly true in the essays about individuals. But once you get into the thick of her "Personals" section, you can't help get wrapped up in it all. "On Self Respect" is a stunning essay, and I ...more
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Read in October, 1998
recommends it for:
Everyone
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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J.D. looks around her world and asks questions. Some of her questions are driven by an editor's assignment but she seems to be unable to lose her voice. I adore her voice, I must say.
She has an acute sense of oh people-in-time, a sort of grasp of history as a true parallel to geological striations: rather than lines in stone there are people and they are notches in time gathered up year after year, building foundations and the whole of the surface of what we consider to be our earth, our gr...more
She has an acute sense of oh people-in-time, a sort of grasp of history as a true parallel to geological striations: rather than lines in stone there are people and they are notches in time gathered up year after year, building foundations and the whole of the surface of what we consider to be our earth, our gr...more
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Read in July, 2000
She's the master of the personal essay. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. "Goodbye to All That," the last essay in this collection, is timeless: it perfectly captures what it feels like to live in New York when you are still very young and not very rich. In the 7 years since I first read this book I've become a little less enamoured - she uses a lot of predictable devices and tricks over and over again to establish tone in her writing, and it seems she cops out a lot, opting for style ov...more
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Read in July, 2006
Didion captures a huge range of experiences and moments to say something very real about California in the 60s, the feeling of missing something, and about her own youth. As a Californian, I think a lot of what she had to say about California is as true today as it was then. Her line about how "things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent," is very apt. I haven't read any of her other books yet, but Slouching Towards ...more
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Read in January, 2000
recommends it for:
people from California who have left and realized that they do not belong to the rest of the country
I bought a used copy of this collection on the street, just after moving to New York City from California. Just like Didion, "[w]hen I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I had just got off [the airplane]...in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already...[with] the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before." This book made me understand what it mean...more
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book data (includes all editions)
avg rating (all editions): 4.35 (1753 ratings) avg rating (this edition): 4.36 (1649 ratings) number of reviews: 212popular shelves
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quote
"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. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends."
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