Slouching towards bethlehem
by Joan Didion · first published 1967
50% recommend43% neutral7% critical
Why HN recommends it
Observant, precise essays with a distinctive voice that capture late-1960s California, especially San Francisco and Los Angeles. Recommended to anyone curious about that era or about Didion's prose.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
American novelist Joan Didion's first volume of nonfiction essays, first published in 1968, consisting of twenty works that reflect the atmosphere in America during the 1960s, especially in California.
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Joan Didion) Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes) The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (Paul Zindel) The Things They Carried (Tim O' Brien) This Side of Paradise (F. Scott Fitzgerald)…
on “Ask HN: I have no commitments for the next 6 months – what books should I read?” ↗…* No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy * On Writing - Stephen King * 11/22/63 - Stephen King * The Stand - Stephen King * Hell's Angels - Hunter S. Thompson * East of Eden - John Steinbeck * Slouching Towards Bethlehem - Joan Didion * In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
on “Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?” ↗The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse The Road, Cormac McCarthy Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2023 and recommend for 2024” ↗…are bad people, but I think that could be the point here. Not to mention, this is just another chapter in SF's long history of being the vanguard of drug experimentation. You may enjoy Didion's 1967 Slouching towards Bethlehem[1], a similarly anecdotal (and substantially better-written) piece about the drug scene in SF's Summer of Love. [1] https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/06/didion/
on “Notes from the SF Peptide Scene” ↗She's a beautiful writer with a very distinct voice. Observant, noticing the telling details. Her essay compilations "Slouching towards Bethlehem" and "The White Album" are essential reading if you're interested in California in the late 1960s and into the 1970s -- she lived in LA at the time, and is definitely an outsider to the hippie/boomer…
on “Goodbye to all that” ↗Pretty sure I'm singing to the choir here, but "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", I literally cannot recommend it enough.
on “Joan Didion has died” ↗> Eve's Hollywood by Eve Babitz, if you want to fall in love with a Los Angeles even more, great writing Goodreads recommended me this after I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem (which I really liked). Now I have a second opinion so I'll check it out. Thanks :)
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2023 and recommend for 2024” ↗My impression was she wrote more about LA and eastern California than about the Bay Area, but it has been a long time since I opened Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album. I think you're right, though. The later stuff, I can't say--one of these days I should acquire a copy of her and Dunne's The Monster.
on “Where She Was From: The Collected Joan Didion” ↗…California dystopian writings can be attributed to the overuse of amphetamines. The Summer of Love was destroyed by it as the phrase that emerged at the time was "Speed Kills." Joan Didion wrote about it "Slouching Towards Bethlehem.' On the other hand I'm a optimistic utopian, so I may be inclined to minimize and disregard dystopian writing. Where P.K. Dick really got me is in "How to Build a..." [1] in which he's very interested…
on “Philip K. Dick’s dystopia” ↗…Nuclear Fear, entire René Girard, "Hamlet's Dull Revenge" from Theater of Envy p 271-289 Film: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 6 - COUNTERCULTURE: Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, title essay p 84-128 Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, entire Film: Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood 7 - STAGNATION I: JOURNALISTIC ACCOUNTS Christopher Caldwell, the Age of Entitlement, p…
on “Peter Thiel “Stagnation or Progress” Syllabus, Stanford 2020 Course (German 277)” ↗- The Master and His Emissary - Personality (Nettle) - Lonesome Dove - A First-Rate Madness - Slouching Towards Bethlehem - Dune - At the Existentialist Cafe Currently working on "The Hot Zone."
on “Ask HN: What books have you read recently?” ↗…* The Magicians by Lev Grossman * Binti by Nnedi Okarafor * The Truth of the Divine by Lindsay Ellis Currently working my way through The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. I did read a few essay from Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion, but her work is too much of her time for me to truly appreciate it.
on “Ask HN: As the year is about to end, what books did you read?” ↗Strong parallels with Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1967): https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/06/didion/
on “Notes from the SF Peptide Scene” ↗I recently decided to do a deep dive on Joan Didion (and Susan Sontag) to see what she was about without knowing much. I grew up in the Bay Area during the time she wrote about it in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and found it reflected more her sort of depressed and dissociated view of the world than any accuracy about the reality of the era. Her writing did get better and she does deserved high praise, but her…
on “Where She Was From: The Collected Joan Didion” ↗Oh, I haven't heard of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, gonna read that next, thanks
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2023 and recommend for 2024” ↗