My mother was a freshman in college when I was a freshman in high school. Married at seventeen, her 1960s and 70s were spent as a young wife and mother of four. It wasn't until she divorced at thirty-six, the same year Ronald Reagan ushered in the folly of trickle-down economics and the prison-industrial complex, that she discovered "the sixties". She majored in English and one day brought home, as a reading assignment, a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I recall the cover: gun-metal gray wi...

”My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.” One of the cornerstones of friendship is developing some level of trust. It might be possible to be friends with Joan Didion, but the very thing that makes her a wonderful dinner compan...

First published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem considers what happens when the center cannot hold and things fall apart: the three-part collection's twenty essays confront the onset of an age of cynicism in American political and social life. The first part contains pieces specific to California, the second personal essays, the third portraits of places significant to both Didion and America at the end of the 1960s. Didion's prose sprawls with meticulous detail, and is tinted with the jour...

Days after Manson died, I kept thinking about him, how he and his Family had summoned the darkness at the heart of the Summer of Love. I remembered how surprised we all were, that the drugs and the smiles and the flowers had come to this, but then I thought, no, not all of us. Joan Didion would have understood; Joan Didion would not have been surprised.Slouching Toward Bethlehem, a collection of magazine essays and Didion’s second book, is about many things, but mostly it is about ‘60’s Californ...

Just unbelievably good. I'm not the right person to write about Joan Didion, but my God, she is real and she can write.

"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;"- The Second Coming, Yeats“I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.” ― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards BethlehemI'm sure at some point Joan Didion will disappoint. I'm positive the ho...

First published in 1968 to wide popularity, this collection of essays and journalism is a time capsule to the 1960s, for better and for worse, and mostly relating to the experience from a California perspective. There's no question to its significance. When it was published, I suspect readers were thrilled to have someone finally describe life in blunt terms. Reading it today, I found its strengths still lie in the authentic, slice-of-life style. Since I didn't live through the '60s, it felt ref...

"To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference." Somehow, I usually read Didion on a blue night, when it's so bright outside that I open my curtains to search for the moon; instead, what greets me is a pale hue of blue sky. When I read Blue Nights, I had a similar experi

like with any didion work, she always approaches her subjects with such precision and purpose. every language choice is intentional, every sentence is so eloquent, every detail is meticulously written. she perfectly captures the essence of 1960s california and its cultural politics, somehow making me nostalgic for a place and time i never even experienced. i haven’t read much else on the subject, but i can’t imagine anyone writing about california as well as joan didion. my fave essays were: ‘so...

"I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder."Slouching Towards Bethlehem is Joan Didion's seminal essay collection detailing life in Northern California, most notably the 1960s counter culture. The title essay contrasts Didion's impressions of S

I remember being really impressed with Didion's novel 'Play It as It Lays' a couple of years back, and reading her nonfiction for the first time I was equally; if not more so, impressed with this seminal collection of essays, of which I didn't know that quite a lot of them had previously been published as magazine articles. Didion is certainly a powerful stylist, as she looks on like a surveyor at the shifting scene of American life in the Golden State during a time of social upheaval in the sec...

I realize what is disturbing about these essays and what leaves the acrid aftertaste on the leftist tongue about Didion. And I don't think it has much to do with her relatively measured take on the drug-addled Haight-Ashbury scene. For better, but admittedly and sadly often for worse, the radical leftist imagination has been characterized by a willingness and a desire to leap out of our skin into the skin of others, to experience a jump of radical empathy in which the concerns of "they" become t...

Audiobook….(6 hours and 53 minutes long)…. …..read by Diane Keaton (‘outstanding’ as the voice narrator)“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” was first published in 1968.It was very engaging listening to Diane Keaton read sentences …with her wonderful enunciation choices……yet reading these essays and articles would allow more time to pause-linger-and digest Joan Didion’s prose deeper…..(I’m sure of it)…But….still laidback from a recent Hawaiian vacation……soaking in our warm pool while rain ‘poured’ heav...

This is Joan's first essay collection, and the focus is largely on California, in the 1960s, with a few exceptions. I love her ability to write about people and to connect them to specific places. It feels like a time capsule about a place that doesn't exist the same way anymore, at least not completely. Even the Santa Ana winds may have changed.

I read this essay collection – Joan Didion’s first – earlier this year, but of course I had been hearing about it for decades. It and other Didion books like The White Album are famous in a way that few such collections are. And you can easily see why. The best of these pieces open up the possibilities of the essay form, and they show off an enquiring, questing, rigorous mind. I’ll never forget the book’s opening essay, “Some Dreamers Of The Golden Dream,” which on the surface seems like an acco...

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays, Joan DidionSlouching Towards Bethlehem is a 1968 collection of essays by Joan Didion that mainly describes her experiences in California during the 1960's. One critic describes the essay as "a devastating depiction of the aimless lives of the disaffected and incoherent young," with Didion positioned as "a cool observer but not a hardhearted one." Another scholar writes that the essay’s form mirrors its content; the fragmented structure resonates with the essa...

Joan Didion is an insightful and skeptical thinker, an astute ironist, and a beautiful prose stylist: Slouching Towards Bethlehem exemplifies her craft. While all of her essays are exemplary in form, some fall by the wayside of memory, and even only a week removed from my first foray in Didion, only a few remain with me with any moving power. Slouching Towards Bethlehem skirts the two worlds of my known (intimacy) and my unknown (distance): what it means to be a twentysomething, a skeptic, a thi...

The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Joan Didion and Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays. Published in 1968, the book is a compilation of pieces commissioned mostly by the Saturday Evening Post in the 1960s, ranging from exposés on John Wayne or Michael Laski (founder of the Communist Party USA) to essays on herself to the title piece, which documents runaways in Haight-Ashbury in 1967. "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" is a wonderfully grimy lon...

I loved the sheer beauty and rigor and power of the sentences. I'd never read anything by her before but I'd heard great things. I picked this up for 50 cents on a lark and found it to be ideal subway reading. I don't say this lightly, mind- I spend a lot of time reading on subway ( ars is pretty longa and vita is DEFINITELY brevis ) and having a book that meshes well with the overal mise en scene is key. It might be that Didion seems to be uniquely fascinated with urban landscapes and t

Joan Didion, where have you been all my life? My husband has been trying to get me to read her books for years, and I see now how blindly stupid I've been in not reading her sooner. Most of the essays in "Slouching Towards Bethlethem" are wondrous; there were only a few that didn't amaze me. (The piece on the Haight-Ashbury district, for example, dragged on way too long and wasn't as interesting as it would have been when it first appeared in 1967. Similarly, the 1964 piece on Hollywood was so e...

Who was I when I first read this and liked it yet managed to forget almost everything about it? (An apt consideration here, as anyone who's read this will know.)'AS IT HAPPENS I am in Death Valley, in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, and it is July, and it is hot. In fact it is 119F. I cannot seem to make the air conditioner work, but there is a small refrigerator, and I can wrap ice cubes in a towel and hold them against the small of my back. With the help of the ice cubes I hav...

the best you can look is if you're carrying a copy of this book around as you browse at an indie bookstore

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays was a searing collection of essays by Joan Didion, most previously published in various magazines in 1965, 1966, and 1967, and taking place in California. In the Preface Ms. Didion shares how hard it is for her to interview people and to meet her deadlines. She describes her success as a reporter thus: "My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget...

3.5 stars. The writing exemplifies the sentiments and mood of the counter culture of the 60's, Didion does indeed capture it exceptionally well. Dry and sharply delivered and filled with references and dissections of social issues she is definitely the voice of a generation albeit it comes across a little dated now. I wish I could say I liked this collection as a whole, not all essays resonated with me and left me underwhelmed more often than not, I had high hopes for this so maybe my expectatio...

I don't mean to be super fangirl about this collection, because a lot of the essays were fine but didn't blow my socks off. However, the ones that I really liked? I really fucking liked. And I know that a couple of months from now, probably even a few years from now, even with my shitty-shit memory, I will look back at this collection and think happy thoughts because of the essays that made my little Grinch heart explode into brightly flavored fireworks of flowers and sunshine and unicorns.I don...

How can one possibly not love Joan Didion be it for her fiction or non-fiction. These twenty essays demonstrate her skills not only as a journalist but also as an incredible author. I must confess the essay on Howard Hughes scintillated me. As for the title which I found very unusual. I was intrigued to see that W.B. Yeats was Didion's inspiration, as shown in the last two sentences of his poem:"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"Why did she

Fascinating time capsule of the 60s. I enjoyed the lens on Sacramento. (view spoiler)[Summary Some Dreamers of the olden Dream - interesting start. Housewife post murder of her husband. Didion ponders the nature of the role of women at that time. The essay never established innocence or guilt, it pondered what must of have gone on in her head, while examining the predetermined role of a wealthy wife/socialite in the 60s. John Wayne: A Love Song - Didion laments the manliness and masculinity of J...

I decided to get my Joan Didion on this summer in preparation for the biography that comes out next month, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her first essay collection, seemed like a good place to start. It's true that some of these essays are hopelessly dated, kind of like those true-crime articles that appear in Vanity Fair that no one's going to care about in five months, let alone fifty years (although the majority of these particular essays were published in The Saturday Evening Post). But o...

Everyone I know who reads a lot or considers themselves writers has told me to read Joan Didion. I always cringe and go the other way when too many people tell me to do the same thing. I’m not sure where, or when, this resistance to Didion started. But it has somehow manifested itself in my psyche. During my first semester at Antioch University, Rob Roberge, in one of his brilliant seminars, made a few comical references to her. Not her writing, but of Didion, or more precisely the cult of Didio...

From the book....“I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.” ===========Didion's greatest two-word sentence.....https://www.thecut.com/2021/12/joan-d...==================My family moved from a small town in New Hampshire to the SF Bay Area when I was age 7. There was no “Silicon Valley” then. If Didion were writing about California today, I am sure a new volume would include her unique take on the land of tech. Since my