I decided to take a little respite from The List, as I realized it had been a long time since I had read any non-fiction. So what did I discover? Around the same time the S.F. Chronicle made The Fiction List, they also made a non-fiction list. I have no plans to work through this one systematically in any way, shape, or form, but it did give me a few ideas. There are a few Western history books on there that I would like to take a look at, but also I have been thinking lately about picking up some New/Gonzo Journalism books, since I've really enjoyed what I've read in the genre in the past--particularly Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson.

In that spirit, my latest read was Joan Didion's The White Album. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Broken into five sections, this features about 20 short pieces, many of which are themselves broken into 3 or 4 distinct vignettes. I don't know that there's one overriding theme, but the recurrent subjects are the '60s and its aftermath (up to the late '70s when this was published), life in California, and Didion's own quirky politics which are basically left-center, but seriously divergent from the mainline of '60s protest culture. Some essays are intensely personal, such as the one about Didion's experiences on her first book tour and particularly the one about learning to cope with intense migranes that put her out of commission four to five days per month. Two of my favorites are "Many Mansions" and "Bureaucrats"--the former dealing with the strange cultural/class politics around the new California governor's mansion built by the Reagans and never inhabited, and the latter discussing Caltrans's efforts to create a diamond lane on the Santa Monica freeway and the strange cultural and other miscalculations involved therein.

The closest Didion comes to a personal political manifesto is the penultimate essay "On the Morning After the Sixties", in which she ruminates about what it was like to be at Berkeley in the mid-fifties, prior to the massive upheaval of the '60s. She says her generation came of age in a more "personal" time, that they were "the last generation to identify with adults" and that for them "the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate." The last line of this essay will be the thing I most take away from this book when I think of Didion: "If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending."

Didion is perhaps bleak in this pronouncement, but I appreciate her honesty and I have often identified with this sentiment myself. However, I also know enough about Didion's other work to know that she is not apolitical as a result of such thinking, and that she must believe in some possibility of positive change. I have also come to believe that, although I think that those changes are much more likely on the micro, local level than higher up. I think improving some people's lives is a manageable task, while "improving life" is not. Believe it or not, this actually makes me less cynical than I used to be; maybe grad school was not my complete ruination after all!

I'll be heading back to the list now, though between my two jobs, looking for a permanent job, and being sick and thus exhausted for the last couple of days, my reading has ground if not to a halt then at least to a trickle. I'd like to get through a couple of books over the next week that need to go back to the library, and then get to the gift that arrived in the mail two days ago--thanks Jeff!!

I hope I can post something a little more light-hearted sometime today or tomorrow...