“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

Joan Didion, "The White Album" from The White Album

Run, River (1963) is a novel by one of my favorite essayists, the writer's writer Joan Didion. I never met a Didion essay I didn't like, a lot. She writes about suburban shopping malls, the opulent mansions in Newport, lots about California including the Manson family, and all sorts of social commentary. She wrote a couple of memoirs after losing her daughter and her husband within a couple years of each other. I'd never read one of her novels until this month, when I downloaded Run, River and listened to it in the car. I didn't know if my fascination with her writing would carry over to her novels. It took me some time to get into it, but by the halfway point I was engrossed. The character development and nuances of storytelling are masterful. I don't know how Didion did it, but I started thinking I was (protagonist) Lily, while alone with her in the car. We have little in common, so it wasn't that I related to her thoughts, feelings, and bad decisions. I just understood her thanks to Didion's fantastic writing.

Lily, Everett, Martha, Joe, Ryder, and a few parents and offspring populate the novel. I'm not going to give awayany secrets, because the way Didion reveals those secrets is part of the beauty of the novel. At least one of those characters end up dead, and please don't expect this author to tell you straight out how this happens. Nope, she casually mentions that person's funeral merely as a point on a timeline when she's describing another event. Wait, what? Did I miss something? If I had been reading a print book, I could have paged back a bit to see what I accidentally skimmed over. With an audio book, there's not a possibility to go back especially when driving. It would have been a waste of time anyway, because this was simply a cavalier mention of a death that hasn't happened yet. Eventually, Didion gets around to telling us what happened to this character in the most deliciously suspenseful way. There are plenty more storytelling treasures here.

That quote at the top of this post is a favorite of many Joan Didion fans. It comes at the beginning of her autobiographical essay, "The White Album" from a collection by the same name. The essays were written between 1968 and 1978. "The White Album" is the essay in which she writes about Charles Manson, meeting Jim Morrison and the Doors, and other tales of 1960s California. She demonstrates her unique gift for people-watching in these essays, and guess what: she "watches" her fictional characters as astutely. Through her descriptions of Lily, Everett, and Martha, along with insight into what they are thinking and how they are reacting, the story crescendos to that death I told you about (vaguely). "We tell ourselves stories in order to live..." and to understand how others live. The people of Run, River make mistakes and bad decisions and live their lives, and Joan Didion helps us understand them. Sometimes we read stories in order to understand life, don't you think?

MMM's Book of the Month Club

Remember when we still read books made of paper and there were these clubs where you could get a new book sent to your doorstep every month? "If you don't want this month's book, send the card back with the appropriate box checked. If you do want the book, do nothing. It will appear in your mailbox at the beginning of the month." I used to be in the Quality Paperback Book Club and was exposed to some great books that way. For a while I was in a craft book club, and back in grad school in the 1980s I was in a classical record club that operated the same way. A person could accumulate a quality library this way.

This bookofthemonth club will work differently: I'm not sending books out to readers, but I will tell you about the best books I read. I read a lot of books because I love reading, and I read a lot of books because I'm a writer. I read many travel books, or more precisely books about place, so those will probably appear here. I read many other genres, too, and as a librarian and known book lover I recommend books to readers frequently.

Maybe you won't be interested in every book I recommend, but I hope you will check in to this book blog at the beginning of each month to see what I've got for you. It might be old or new, nonfiction or fiction, or it could be from some other genre. You'll be surprised.