Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.63 AVERAGE
3.63 AVERAGE
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Made me feel a certain way
“Weather would come in on the radar - and be bad”
adventurous
challenging
emotional
informative
lighthearted
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
emotional
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
I don’t really understand why this was published. It’s a little unnerving to read Didion unsure of herself, unable to connect the images she is copying down. Her voice is still present but slightly garbled. There were plenty of striking passages and interesting insights, which is why it gets 3 stars. But I don’t feel like I learned anything about her process by reading these notes. Maybe just that she starts with specificity—collects images before putting them together.
dark
reflective
medium-paced
adventurous
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Baby’s first Didion. I like her way of writing & the way that she expresses her thoughts & observations, but I feel inclined to read more of her work because I thought that this specific book was rather boring. It did, however, give me a feel of her writing style, which I appreciated, so I’d still like to read more of her work.
5 stars just for this sentence: “It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?” I just love Joan Didion.
I love Didion's essay about keeping a notebook, so this was a treat. It's always interesting reading someone's perceptions of a place, and this line was the best: "It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?"
Joan Didion takes beautiful notes and I wish my journal entries were as insightful and full of promise as hers. However, this is just a collection of notes and memories, snippets of conversations or passing billboards. It's not that motivating to keep reading to get to the next part because there isn't continuity. The most interesting part was her conversations with white people in Mississippi just after desegregation. Again, just snippets, and I wish there had been more there. She, from what I understand in this book, never wrote an essay on her experiences roadtripping through the South. Ah well.