What am I in for? Also thoughts on Joan Didion?

What am I in for? Also thoughts on Joan Didion?

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Never heard of him

>him
Joan is the most mom name user

some really great essays

it's long as hell though and there's a decent amount of burger politics that i as a yuroshit didn't find very interesting (but still highly readable, since it's didion). don't miss out on the last part however, the california chronicles. they're great

The essay on Comrade Lasky cured my Communism. The tragic irony was that he later blew all the party funds in Vegas.

I just started reading The White Album by her and its really great imo. Idk what it is about journalist authors that I like so much. They are just so concise and to the point. I especially enjoyed drawing parallels from the 60's/70's to now. In politics in academia its like that saying "the more things change the more they stay the same"

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Oh shit...gonna be making some amazon purchases soon. If only I didn't have a 32 book backlog.

Boomer: The Female, but I have to admit she can write pretty well

My backlog is 70+ ;_;

Her collected nonfiction imo is better than any of her proper fiction, good sobering takes on Reagan era politics while they were happening

When you finish that you might want to pick up Play It As It Lays, which is a short novel about Los Angeles.

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I've stopped measuring my backlog in books, now I measure it in fields. I'm probably just gonna ditch the whole thing at this point.

She’s a good writer. I love that one essay which ends with the guys looking for hash under the floorboards while a kid dies.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album are both excellent, both focus heavily on the counterculture movements in California during the late sixties. Being a part of New Journalism, she often writes about her experience covering a given story and many of her essays are outright about her, but it is never self indulgent. I started reading her around the same time I got into Hunter S. Thompson and I think they contrast pretty interestingly. Both of them focus a lot on the failures and folly of the sixties radical movements and counterculture, and while the two of them have completely different personalities and styles they both express similar feelings about what went wrong. If you're interested in the period it might be good to read the two Didion books along with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, but that's just a suggestion.
She really is fascinating, I wasn't crazy about her novel Play it as it Lays, but all her nonfiction that I've read is brilliant.

If I had a time machine I’d fuck her young

I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem and loved it, contains some really great mood pieces. That one essay about how much she loves her daughter and is hopeful to see what she'll grow up to become is one of the most crushing things I've ever read with the knowledge that about a year later her daughter died. I don't have kids or anything but fuck if that essay doesn't make you hurt then you have no heart.

Woah user I just started reading The White Album and I had the same thoughts. This isn't helping my paranoia.

She's like a more intelligent, less immature Sylvia Plath, and I don't mean that just because they're both women. I think the way she describes her experiences with mental illness and psychiatry to be a lot more thoughtful and less melodramatic.

Joan Didion is the best of the New Journalists. Her prose is a lot better than her counterparts. Her fiction is garbage.

It's interesting that she's lauded by women writers even though she's a crypto reactionary (her essay on the women's movement as juvenile) and her political analyses are sometimes too pointed, there just for effect.

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Well MY mom's name is Ruth!

Didion is /mom/core desu