Magical Thinking & Walking the Woods

Two reflections on two reads:

1) After saying I had no interest in reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, I succumbed to the allure of the discount book bin and figured I would give Didion another shot, despite still not having read the ONE book of hers I was originally interested in (Slouching Towards Bethlehem). It was sad in a matter-of-factual way. I re-learned that privileged famous people grieve and suffer like the rest of us. I felt her loss even as she talked about multiple homes and Malibu beaches and Corvettes. And that pretty much sums up the extent of my impression.

(Apparently we loved her in 2015? How Joan Didion Became the Ultimate Literary Celebrity & Toward a Unified Theory of Joan Didion)

Bottom line: I'll continue to have a "meh / okay" reaction to Didion that will be either confirmed or rebuffed after Slouching Towards Bethlehem.


2) I zoomed excitedly through Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, subtitled "Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail." The book ended and I needed it to keep going for another 200 pages, or 2,000 pages. Returning to my last entry and thoughts on contemporary travel writing, Bryson avoids the "expert witness explaining the natives" trap through his humility and humor -- he's just a out-of-shape everyman who wants to try hiking the trail with his friend, and he happens to be well-informed about the trail's ecological history. There's no soaring rhetoric and little/no existential musings about nature or long-distance hiking ... and that's okay for this story. On a personal note, the book also rekindled a life goal of hiking the AT (section-hiking, not thru-hiking, let's be real). Thanks, Bill Bryson!

Bottom line: Awesome easy read, highly recommend even if you never want to hike the AT!

AT marker at Pen-Mar, photo by yours truly

Ebert & Didion

(Pet peeve:  being unable to find a library book that is allegedly on the shelf.  If I had a nickel for every time this has happened to me, I'd be able to cover all my overdue charges.)

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.