Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Heartbreaking work on staggering loss

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

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Joan Didion passed away in late December, 2021, which made the beginning of 2022 feel like the right time to read arguably her most famous book, The Year of Magical Thinking. The Year of Magical Thinking is a memoir on grief. On December 30, 2003, Didion and her husband, John Dunne, returned home from visiting their daughter, Quintana, in the hospital, where she was suffering from severe pneumonia. They fell into their usual evening pattern- starting the fire, making dinner- when John had a heart […]

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

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This is my first in depth experience with Didion’s writing (although likely not my last as I have Year of Magical Thinking already on this year’s to read list). Slouching Towards Bethlehem as a title caught my imagination years ago and has stayed with me (I was unaware it was a further literary illusion, missing the Yeats connection). This is Didion’s definitive portrait America, but most specifically California, in the 1960s. I read plenty of books published outside of my own lifetime, but reading Slouching […]

News from back then

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

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I’d previously read and loved The White Album, so when I saw Slouching Toward Bethlehem come up in a kindle sale I was very quick to click. A collection of essays from the the 1960’s, as with any book of essays this was something of a mixed bag for me, and having been born 10 years after its publication (as well as being English) I must admit that unfamiliarity with some of the people, places and things being written about meant I didn’t quite get […]

We tell ourselves stories to live.

The White Album by Joan Didion

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So I hadn’t read the title essay from this collection before, and while I had heard the famous opening line, I didn’t know the broader context of her meaning. What sounded trite quoted, makes a lot more sense in full (as these things happen). The telling of stories in this case is a kind of narrative (and even myth) making and understanding about the contexts of our lives. The storytelling part is the way to make sense of (even when lying) of a particular moment […]

This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Salvador by Joan Didion

The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion

Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion

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Slouching Toward Bethlehem – 4/5 Stars Turns out that I think that Joan Didion’s essays are much stronger than her novels. I think this will remain a consistency as I read more of each of these works and come to a better understanding about them. This collection, from the mid-1960s traces both American history of this time-period (in a kind of anthropological and political way) and Joan Didion’s own personal history (in a kind of cultural history). We get essays on local civic campaigns to […]

fun fact: name dropping Joan Didion no less than 45 times in your 270 page book does not make you Joan Didion

Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession by Alice Bolin

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You know that dream where you realize that you have been in assigned to a class for an entire semester, but you have never once attended the class? You “wake up” on the day that your final is due and panic, then cobble together whatever previous assignments that you have scattered about that might be able to pass for whatever you were supposed to do in that class? I am fairly sure that’s what happened to Alice Bolin when she woke up one day, book […]



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