"That is what it was all about, wasn't it? Promises?"

2019 is going to be a big year of short stories and essays for me, because at my current job I have only a half-hour lunch break, and thus need books that don't lose much from being read only in little chunks. (I also need titles that are available on Hoopla, because none of my coworkers bring books to work, so I read on my phone to avoid being ostracized. Sort of like middle school, except that in middle school I gave absolutely zero fucks about being ostracized. And was. Quite thoroughly so.)

Anyway. I decided to go with Joan Didion for my first essay collection of the year, for couple of reasons. For one thing, a friend of mine with whom I frequently talk about books is a fan of hers. For another, I've always felt a little inadequate for only having read The Year of Magical Thinking, and that some ten years ago. It was assigned to my Creative Nonfiction class in undergrad, and I remember not really appreciating or understanding it, probably because I was a kid in my early twenties, and thus ill-equipped to read memoirs about marriage and loss. Because I didn't understand those things at all then, and understand them only slightly better now.

I picked Slouching Towards Bethlehem because it was deemed a good place to start in a Book Riot article I read sometime last year, rather than out of any affinity for the subject matter. I was born in 1988 and have never been to California. For those reasons a collection of essays focused primarily on the West Coast in the '60s perhaps should have seemed as vaguely unnecessary to me now as Didion's writing was to me in college, but that wasn't the case.

What struck me about the essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem is Didion's strong voice. And by "strong voice" I don't mean the inescapable ego present in most essays I read now--and hell, in this rambling thing I'm writing at this very moment. Didion's voice is characterized by clear observation and a shrewd eye for revealing details, a watchful perspective that spans all of her pieces regardless of her subject matter. But there were times in the first section of the book when I forgot that, by necessity, she as a person was present in the situations she was describing. She allows her subject to occupy the reader while she fades to the background, essential but unseen, and it's impressive.

She's also adept at creating a sense of place. (All of the writing workshop terminology that I haven't been able to use much since 2011 is coming out tonight, apparently.) Again, the details. Her descriptions come in long, winding sentences that verge on the poetic, lulling you into a clear image of places you might never have seen in real life. The effect is great whether she's describing Honolulu or Alcatraz or Sacramento, but I think that it's displayed at its finest in "Goodbye to All That," the concluding personal essay in which she describes moving to and from New York. I read it at home, with rain pattering on the window and Simon & Garfunkel playing in the background, and honestly, I can't recommend a better reading setting, at least for this particular essay.

Up next for me and Joan Didion will be The White Album.