Sun 1 Oct 2023

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The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion 

 
As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was.  I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.  The way I write is who I am or have become. p.7

 

This was the beginning of my year of magical thinking p.33

 

Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self-pity. p.77

 

A thoughtful read.  Didion beautifully captures shock, mourning and grief in a very  human way.  This short novel is full of reflections following the sudden death of her husband and her daughter’s illness which portray gritty human emotion of a mother, wife and woman. She looks back on the days and months leading to his death and reflectively unravels the possible signs of its approach, she questions if he knew it was going to happen, and if so, if there was anything she could have done to prevent it. The questioning of what the living can do in the face of death and thereafter, how we learn to cope and even memorialise those who are no longer with us, is at the heart of this book.

 

There were a few times where Didion’s prose became a little too heavy with name droppings which I didn’t fully comprehend but as with most of her writing she is brutally transparent with the reader, even if at times unrelatable.  She retains the very personal even as she writes about a very universal experience.

 

Rating 7/10. 

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Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
 

Camila: I think you have to have faith in people before they earn it.  Otherwise it’s not faith, right? p.82

 

Billy: It’s sometimes difficult to say what I knew and when I knew.  It’s… it’s all a mess in my memory.  It’s hard to parse out, I guess. What happened when or why I did what I did.  Hindsight bias…And I looked at her, just before we started singing, and I think- I really do think this – I think I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life.  In that way that you appreciate things more acutely…I mean…you appreciate people more acutely when they are fleeting, right?  And I think I knew she was fleeting.  I think I knew she was leaving, I don’t know how I knew.  But I feel like I knew.  I probably didn’t know.  It just feels like it. p.349 -350

 

I really enjoyed this read, it was a page turner, in that it’s written in interview form.  The question-and-answer format/fictionalised journalism made you want to learn more about the characters.

I think the most impressive thing about the book is how it has turned into such a media package? (Is that a viable way to describe it?) The book, made into script, was made into a TV show, and the fictional band is now a real band, with an album inspired by the book/tv show too.  I think my favourite part of the media party it has become is the TV show, but before I rave about the show let me talk about its literary counterpart.

 

The characters are very well developed and seem to have more of a connection in the written form, something which the TV show is lacking, which I think is down to the limited time to flesh out characters on screen, but I think that’s one of the strengths of the written word. It’s able to play more with the time structure, character development, relationships, and also gives alternating points of view through its interview format. The story follows the start, rise, and end of a band, loosely inspired by Fleetwood Mac, in the 70s.  Filled with the various stereotypes of a 70s band, the heart-throb, the heartbreakers, the beautiful women, the fame, the drugs, alcohol, sex and eventual infidelity and breakup.  I found Daisy – the protagonist, quite unlikeable and a little unrealistic at times, but I guess this is what makes her such a loveable character.  She is portrayed as the band’s star in word and on screen, flaws and all, with a troubled childhood, she comes out of the ashes - a phoenix who leads the band into their flight into fame. Her relationship with the other lead of the band – Billy, is heartfelt and heartbreaking even for the audience at times.

 

The most beautifully written part of the novel, I think is the ending.  And the format of the book makes even more of an impact in its contribution to what is revealed. Overall, for all of its glam, rock and roll, and romance, Taylor Jenkins Reid deserves praise for recreating such an iconic era, whilst also making a new one of her own.

 

Rating 8/10. 

 

 

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

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Around the same time, as I began to regain my sense of balance, I reread the work of my friend and mentor Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who’d died a few months earlier.  She’d once written, “For anyone trying to discern what to do with their life: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO.  That’s pretty much all the info u need.”

My attention had become so fractured, and my world had become so loud, that I wasn’t paying attention to what I was paying attention to. p.6

 

Marvelling at the perfection of that leaf, I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see.  From the quark to to the supernova, the wonders do not cease.  It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that it requires.

Still, I’m fond of our capacity for wonder. p.33

 

For quite a while here in Indianapolis, the only answer to “Why is the sky blue?” has been that it isn’t blue.  I keep thinking about a line from a Mountain Goats song, “The gray sky was vast and real cryptic above me.”
There’s a phrase in literary analysis for our habit of ascribing human emotions to non human: the pathetic fallacy, which is often use to reflect the inner life of characters through the outer world, as when Keats in “Ode on Melancholy” writes of a “weeping cloud,” or Shakespeare in Julius Caesar refers to “threatening clouds.” Wordsworth writes of wandering “lonely as a cloud.” In Emily Dickinson’s poetry, sometimes the clouds are curious, other times mean.  Clouds separate us from the sun when we need shade, but they also separate us from the sun when we need light. They are like the rest of us, quite context-dependent. p.216

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I picked this book up during a long weekend in London, in Daunt Books, Marylebone – one of the most aesthetically cosy, but also extensive bookshops I visited on the trip.  It was high on my list of bookshops to visit, as recommended by many a book-tok-er I have stumbled upon, and is one I most definitely recommend if you are in London.

 

I used to be such a big fan of John Green as a tween, from Looking for Alaska, Will Grayson Will Grayson, Paper Towns, to The Fault in or Stars, and his last fictional work thus far, Turtles All the Way Down, he was up there with my childhood favourite, Jacqueline Wilson. I am trying to read more non-fiction this year, and so this was a good one to add to the list, and one which reminded me that even nonfiction work can be creative, curious and interesting, and needn’t be all science, statistics and graphs. Green writes with a sincerity, which always makes you feel, when reading, that you are having a conversation with an old friend.  I guess that’s why it makes a lot of sense that this is also the same title of a podcast he used to record too – which I also much recommend, in fact I recognise a few of the chapters, from listening to them in the past years. John and Hank Green – if you’re not in the know, are OG youtubers under ‘vlogbrothers.’  They make video replies to each other weekly, on their weekly observations of the world/recent happenings in their life.

 

This has to be one of my favourite reads of the year so far, and has helped me look at the everyday in a new and refreshing way.  I love books which are simple, about humanity, and offer a new perspective on often overlooked conditions.  This read was so easy, and a joy to read.

 

Some of my favourite chapters include:

Our capacity for wonder
Harvey
Wintry Mix
New partner

Postscript

 

Rating 9/10.