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Stoner by John Williams
5.0

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”

What starts out as a master class in stoicism gradually and painstakingly evolves into something more kinetic. In the space of 278 pages I went from detached apathy to heart wrenching empathy. This is a world where the unethical and immoral frequently emerge victorious while the diligent and principled repeatedly take it in the shorts. That strikes me as pretty close to home.