My soulmate is a 74 year old woman.

Joan Didion is the one writer I can return to again and again. I marvel at each paragraph, each sentence. Her voice is unique and though she has many imitators she has no equal. I still regularly reread The White Album which I discovered as a teenager over 20 years ago. This it a beautiful edition and a wonderful collection.

Wat valt er te zeggen. Haar verhalen mogen dan wel de late twintigste eeuw een spiegel voorhouden, ze lezen nog steeds alsof ze hard willen inbeuken op de staat van de wereld en onze moraal. Haar stijl is scherp, spitsvondig en nietsontziend. Deze Nederlandstalige bundeling bevat enkele van haar beroemdste essays, een paar memorabele columns en een aantal doorwrochte politieke analyses. Alles samen slechts een beperkte selectie uit haar omvangrijke oeuvre, maar niettemin de moeite waard.

If you enjoy a good mystery, I recommend The Winter Sister by Megan Collins. It is a suspenseful page turner filled with secrets, obsession, and murder. #reading #read #books #feedtheread #fiction #thriller

What is there to say about the collected nonfiction of Didion? Books worth. There was no one with more acute insight into her time than Didion. At the time she seemed, to me, too much a product of her conservative California background. Now I just think she was right about so many things in her analysis of the sixties and seventies. Read it for the quality of her writing, if for nothing else.

Voelt ongepast om Joan Didion met sterren te beoordelen. Zij is van een andere orde.

Recently I developed this particular interest for the North American journalistic narrative, quite unknown to me. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, however, it's a lot more than that: It begins with some sort of chronicle and continues with unclassifiable short texts. All of them with a certain common feature highlighted by the style, sense of humor, intelligence and ability to connect the anecdotes of a writer - sometimes inexperienced, sometimes renowned - with the land and its time. She writes as if it were the easiest thing, even though she insists on ,,confessing" how paralyzing it is to go on for weeks and weeks without finishing a single paragraph; and she does it, as well, with all her quirks, pathologies and obsessions, deepening where we might only see a body of water, a headache or an old west film.

Didion, moreover, writes like a woman, although this is an institution I can barely justify.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem - 5
The White Album - 5
Salvador - 3.5
Miami - 4
After Henry - 4.5 (bc of "Sentimental Journeys")
Political Fictions - 5
Where I Was From - 3.5

This book taught me how to read and write.

A mammoth immersion (1,122 pages) in one of America's best and most penetrating observers of the society in which she lived. In retrospect it might have been better to consume this in small doses as the huge repast it represents for the reader can occasionally cause indigestion. At least in that one is tempted to gloss over parts of the particularly densely prosed passages and that way miss some of the hidden gems of brilliance.

Beautiful

All of Joan Didion's nonfiction writing on place, politics, lifestyle, and cultural figures from the 1960s to 2003 together in one volume? What a dream. Her devotion to detail, shrewd observations, and concise, lyrical language does it for me EVERY TIME.
In order of my appreciation: "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" captures the counterculture of the sixties, its mood and lifestyle, as symbolized by California, Joan Baez, Haight-Ashbury. Her profile of Joan Baez (“Exactly where…she wants to be seems an open question, bewildering to her”) to Bill Clinton’s impeachment (what she calls “Vichy Washington”). "The White Album" covers the revolutionary politics and “contemporary wasteland” of the late sixties and early seventies, in pieces on the Manson family, the Black Panthers, and Hollywood. Civil war in "Salvador," Miami’s complicity in the Cold War, 1980s political culture in "After Henry," the destruction of American democracy in Political Fictions and the realization that California cannot fulfill dreams in "Where I Was From."