Read Roger Ebert's autobiography "Life Itself" and Joan Didion's "After Henry." I've been an Ebert fan since I started reading his reviews in the local newspaper years ago, and he has a fantastic blog here: Roger Ebert's Journal. Joan Didion I kept hearing about because of her now-popular "Year of Magical Thinking" -- a book that I have no interest in reading. I wasn't able to get my hands on "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" (see above pet peeve), thus a second-rate settling.
Didion does this thing where she leaves out certain punctuation, so it's a tad difficult to separate phrases and distracting when I need to reread a sentence several times. Aside from that, I got a hoot out of her political essays. Who knew 1988 was repeating itself this very year? She quotes a NYTimes article: "Mr. Dukakis is no longer the candidate of 'inevitability' but the candidate of order" (p.79). Mitt Romney, anyone? I also loved her perspective on Bush the first: "That George Bush might have thrived in Texas not in spite of being but precisely because he was a member of the Northeastern elite was a shading that had no part in the narrative" (p.68). Also mostly this (p.113-114):
I remembered each other member of this class as older and wiser than I had hope of ever being ... not only older and wiser but more experienced, more independent, more interesting, more possessed of an exotic past: marriages and the breaking up of marriages, money and the lack of it, sex and politics and the Adriatic seen at dawn: not only the stuff of grown-up life itself but, more poignantly to me at the time, the very stuff that might be transubstituted into five short stories.Exactly how I felt the first time I sat down in Contemporary Drama at college. And would probably still feel if I plopped down at particular workshops/salons/cafes today, even if I happen to see the Adriatic at dawn. I am perpetually in awe of people with exotic experiences, real or perceived.
Ebert was great for introducing Sherman Paul and Studs Terkel (starting "Will the Circle be Unbroken?"). And if I ever get around to Milton, I'm to look up George Williamson from the University of Chicago. Ebert is also a big Werner Herzog fan, and reading this made me want to go rent out every single Herzog movie. Random fact: Roger Ebert wrote "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" -- WHAT?
From "Life Itself," the passage I enjoyed the most was actually cited from another of his books, "Two Weeks in the Midday Sun":
Suddenly I was filled with an enormous happiness, such a feeling as comes not even once a year, and focused all my attention inward on a momentous feeling of joy, on the sense that in this moment everything is in harmony. I sat very still. I was alone at a table in a square where no one I knew was likely to come, in a land where I did not speak the language, in a place where, for the moment, I could not be found.
