Glittering Despair

Play It As It Lays - Joan Didion (Pocket Books, 1970, 1978)


Things I learned from this novel: the late 1960s and early 1970s kinda sucked. I mean, we glamorize them now, with all the free love and flowers and Woodstock and consciousness-altering drugs and activism and stuff. But there was also a lot of using drugs and sex to mask all sorts of pain, and hiding things away, and being corrupt in Hollywood.

I think I am too far outside the time to really understand this novel, because it seemed like Maria had a shitty childhood, made it to NYC where things were shady, fell for the director who cast her in a film where she was gangbanged, and then he made it big and she really didn't, mainly because her husband insisted on institutionalizing their daughter, and then there were affairs and affairs and affairs and eventually someone gets killed. Or dies of his own hand. Or something.

I can't say that Didion's prose isn't evocative, because it was bitterly painful to read, to go into Maria's desperation. So she accomplished what I believe was her vision. It's a successful book. But 40 years later... I find myself lost.

Best of the 00s

(Reposted, a bit late, from Facebook, b/c clearly I have my priorities straight.)
This list was impossible to put together. In the end, I just went back through my blog, which only covers the second half of the decade. So it's my favorite books that were published 2000-09 that I read in 2005-09, with one exception, which was my favorite book of the decade and thus had to be included. It ended up being a slightly surprising list, because some of these I didn't particularly seem to like that much when I first read and posted about them. Who knows how favorites are made?

10. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl
9. Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace (which prob benefited from an Infinite Jest bounce)
8. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
7. The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta
6. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
5. The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
4. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
3. The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
2. The Post-Birthday World, Lionel Shriver (2)
1. My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk (no review, but here are a couple other posts...)