Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking was a deeply intelligent, heart-wrenching portrait of what it really felt like to have her husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, die of a massive coronary failure in their Sutton Place living room while she was making dinner. Oh, and they had just got back from the hospital, where their only child, Quintana Roo, lay in coma due to complications from pneumonia. This was in December of 2003, and Magical Thinking came out two years later, and was definitely one of my favorite books of the decade. So now comes Blue Nights, which is about what it really felt like to have Quintana Roo die in 2005, and about death in general, and life, and being a parent, and being parent of an adopted child, and the perils and pleasures of nostalgia and memory and the seemingly unbearable grief and loneliness of outliving the most important people in the world, your best friends and loved ones. Again, Didion is smart, open, insightful, and honest, and Blue Nights has countless moving, memorable moments. If you haven't read either, start with Magical Thinking... though it doesn't really matter, both are brilliant.