Only downside of this book is its weight.1122 pages, 7 books combined in one.

Joan Didion is the Shakespeare of things that don't quite add up. Situations where what's being said and what's being done are at odds and places where the postcard picture hides ugly, painful truths. Her non-fiction is the opposite of easy reading: the sentences uncurl slowly, and sometimes you don't quite know where she's taking a paragraph or a page until the last few words, when suddenly everything stabs into focus. And given the length of this book (1122 pages), the time-span it covers (forty plus years), the enormous geography (an incomplete list: New York, California, Mexico, Hawaii, El Salvador, Miami, Washington), and the range of subjects (crime, politics, hydrology, civil war, personal history, social history, and more), you might expect it to be a difficult read. But you'd be wrong. Didion is engaging start to finish, as good a writer at 75 as she was at 35, or vice-versa. I'm not sure if there's any subject she could make dull- if one exists, it's been omitted here. And at the end of it, you feel like she has held up a mirror to our times: fractured, weird, often unhappy, but ultimately worth having lived.

It's an awful experience to read Didion, for other people become insufferably dull in comparison to the time spent in her pages. Great writing is fatal in that way. Didion simply destroys the semblance of feigned interest that I have to engage with others, by setting a standard to which no one, not even she, can live up to.

The most consistently outstanding essayist of my lifetime. I can only imagine being as observant and precise as Didion. Not every exercise is, in hindsight, a golden nugget of insight, but when she hits the bulls-eye it's magic. If I had one of these gems in me, what a happy man I would be.

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.



We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely... by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria — which is our actual experience.
― Joan Didion

Having just finished Political Fictions, I have now killed this 1122 pg collection of Joan Didion's nonfiction (Slouching Towards Bethlehem through Where I Was From). This Everyman's Library collection contains seven of her works of nonfiction. Rather than review this collection as a whole, I'll just say it is brilliant and point my fair readers toward my seven sub-collection reviews:

1. Slouching Towards Bethlehem
2. The White Album
3. Salvador
4. Miami
5. After Henry
6. Political Fictions
7. Where I was From

Also, since it is a collection of Didion nonfiction that spans 1968 to 2003 it obviously doesn't include:

A. Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11, 2003; or
B. The Year of Magical Thinking, 2005; or
C. Blue Nights, 2011.

As of this writing, I've read The Year of Magical Thinking (this was my first Didion ever).

I found this title looking at the Dutch selection by Joost de Vries. It looks like a magnificent multibook.
https://lccn.loc.gov/2006041043 lccn
http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancement... description
http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancem... toc
http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancem... biblio

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo... bookpage publisher
Worldcat gives some online loan:
https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780...
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL15626...

Just read another great essay, written in the 70's, on the development of shopping malls as pictures both of American ingenuity and the aimlessness of modern consumer culture (from The White Album). Her nonfiction continues to impress me.

Als ik al een minpunt kan bedenken van deze bundel, dan is het dat het begint met Kruipend naar Bethlehem (Slouching Towards Bethlehem) dat direct zulke hoge verwachtingen schept dat het bijna oneerlijk is voor alles wat erna komt. Gelukkig stelt Didion werkelijk geen moment teleur. Neem alleen al het briljante The White Album, om maar iets te noemen. Elke zin die ze schrijft is even mooi. Joan Didion bezit de gave om je volledig mee te sleuren in haar verhaal, soms zonder dat je weet waar het nou precies over gaat, om je vervolgens aan het eind haarfijn te wijzen op wat er volgens haar mis is met de maatschappij (of met zichzelf, ze spaart ook haar eigen ego niet), dit alles zonder ook maar een enkele keer belerend of hautain over te komen. Dit was mijn eerste kennismaking met Didion en na deze bundel wil ik alles lezen wat ze ooit op papier heeft gezet.

As I always say Joan is a national treasure - this was a re-read but I failed to log it the first time.

I haven't finished this whole book yet, but I wanted to get some thoughts down before I lose them. This is a compilation of several previous books. Which are all collections of non-fiction journalist essays.
The first essay really struck me, it was so beautifully written. When I was finished, I had to keep double checking to make sure it was non-fiction. I then felt the need to search for what had happened since it was written in 1965. I had also just finished reading a couple of books of short stories before this, which I really did not enjoy. So it was strange to love a non-fiction essay that felt like a fabulous short story.
Some of the other essays I've enjoyed but not all so far. I am still intrigued enough to keep reading. Though I've been reading other books in between. Part of what is interesting is also knowing these were written based in the news and attitudes found in the 60s. Later essays make it until 1990, and then I see a few fiction pieces in the back.

did not finish before this book was unknowingly returned not by me

I love and hate Joan Didion. Love her sentences, but often can't quite put my finger on the point.