THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING

I just finished reading Joan Didion's THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING.  I've been reading it for a Book Club Meetup that's discussing it over lunch in a couple of weeks.

The book's a memoir where Didion describes the year after the death of her husband, fellow author John Gregory Dunne.  In addition to being widowed, she also had to deal with her daughter Quintana's medical difficulties, which resulted in emergency brain surgery and a long period of rehabilitation.

Didion's had a long career of reporting, and she describes her state of mind almost like a reporter discussing someone else.  It's an excellent book, though it rather trails off in the later chapters. (I think it was turned into a one-woman show on Broadway with Vanessa Redgrave.)

Now that that book's finished, I've gone back to the "Intoxication" issue of LAPHAM'S QUARTERLY.  I've ordered the book WANDERLUST and I'm going to read it soon, but it still hasn't arrived and I may have to order it again.

Saw Fritz Lang's MAN HUNT yesterday.  It has some style, but credibility isn't its strong point.  It's the one where English big-game hunter Walter Pidgeon points a rifle at Hitler for "the thrill of the hunt," then the Nazis throw him off a cliff so it'll look like an accident, but he survives and escapes to England where the Nazis pursue him and Cockney Joan Bennett falls in love with him...