I picked this one up because I'm doing Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge and needed a travel memoir. This one was short and it was written by Joan Didion, so it was an easy pick. I love the way Didion writes, but this book isn't very good. The tone is rather condescending and it's just not all that interesting.

Joan Didion’s notebook of her drive across Louisiana and Mississippi with her husband in the summer of 1970 is filled with glimpses and impressions of the blazing heat, canopies of kudzu, a sense of disintegration and insularity. Didion interviewed friends of friends and folks who knew about important local happenings, but she had a hard time gathering the ambition to follow through with attending events in the muggy heat. She made notes, but the aimless drift through a South she knew was import...

Joan offers the reader an intimate look at her writing process. Anyone who read Didion would be aware of her personal life, her upbringing, her essays and how she wrote about the loss of a husband and her daughter in her last two non fiction works. Here we are in the 70s in the South ... New Orleans .. the past... the glimpse of conversations in elevators.. the state of various swimming pools in hotels... the process of writing in a notebook The west... the look toward the future... And reading

Nothing makes me want to write more than reading Joan Didion.

South and West: From a Notebook by Joan Didion gives one a lot of insight into the writing process and keen observational skills as we have access to the notes of one of our great contemporary writers. These notes, consisting of notes that were taken for one month during the summer in 1970 when she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and their three-year old daughter traveled around the south starting in New Orleans as they continued their aimless travels through Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississ...

As its subtitle implies, South and West is culled from notebooks Joan Didion kept in the 1970s. It consists of two essays: "California Notes" is a brief, slight piece that apparently became the basis for her book Where I Was From; "Notes on the South" is a much longer, more substantial one about a road trip she and her husband took through the deep south, mostly the gulf coast area, in 1970. In an introduction to this book written in December 2016, novelist Nathaniel Rich claims "Notes on the So...

Think of this as a literary sketchbook, full of jotted down conversation scraps, impressions, memories and thoughts. Most of the book is Didion's reflections on the South circa 1970. The smaller portion of the book deals with California around the time of the Patty Hearst trial. I loved the section devoted to the South; not so much the West.No one writes like Didion - her prose is so pure and crisp, her observations so keen and precise. Didion's tone is always cool, almost clinical, but she cuts...

In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it. Joan Didion could only write about California and I'd read it all. I'm obviously biased as someone who has spent his whole life in the Golden State, but she understands it so deeply and writes about it so well. Sadly most of this is actually about Louisiana and Mississippi, but not sadly really because it's so good.

I love Joan Didion.On any given day, Play it as it Lays fights for a spot in my top three favorite novels of all time alongside Renata Adler's Pitch Dark, Mary Robison's Why Did I Ever, and Joy Williams's State of Grace. I can make (have made) a convincing argument that the opening paragraph of "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is probably the very best opening paragraph in all of creative nonfiction.I think, and I am not alone in this certainly, that her body of work cements her as one of the most

Oh my. Today was a terrible, horrible, truly exceptionally bad day. So, of course, I went to the bookstore. I knew Joan Didion had released a new essay collection and I decided to treat myself to the hardcover instead of waiting for paperback.And boy was it worth it.The moment I dove into her prose I was no longer a stressed-out, sleep-deprived member of the proletariat; rather, I entered the world of Joan Didion's observation. First, New Orleans. Ohh, New Orleans. Somehow Didion has the ability...

How could I forget how perfectly Joan Didion could craft a sentence, capturing every nuance, every irony, even what was unsaid? Although the pieces in South and West never became published essays, the same quality remains. And I see why it is now that these notes for pieces that never got published finally saw the light now in the wake of the election.Because, in fact, Didion, the eternal pessimist, knew what we did not. That nothing has really changed since she and her husband John Gregory Dunn...

Perhaps I’m biased, given that I have also been a Californian stranger in the South and I found so much of this so terribly familiar, but Didion off the cuff is probably more eloquent and more insightful than many others will ever be with years of deliberation.

For diehard Didion fans.This is appropriately titled as a notebook. Very short observations pertaining to Didion's 1970s trip to the South as she wandered from town to town. The joy is in the insights which still hold so much relevance, today. Funny, so much has changed and yet, so little. I'm sorry I failed to transcribe my notes before the library loan ended for I would have liked to have shared a few. Leaves the reader wishing there was more.

"We sat out in back by the bayou and drank gin and tonics and when a light rain began to fall, a kind of mist, Walker never paid any mind but just kept talking, and walking up to the house to get fresh drinks. It was a thunderstorm, with odd light, and there were occasional water-skiers on the black bayou water."This collection is comprised of conversations and observations from a notebook. As is customarily her style, Didion recorded bits and pieces that reveal lifestyle and cultural landscape....

There’s no question that Joan Didion is a masterful, almost preternaturally gifted writer. Her words leap off the page with a striking dynamism; her talent for precise observation and vividly detailed renderings of her experiences and surroundings is consistently manifest. But the heretofore unpublished journal notes which comprise South and West—though vibrantly, often beautifully written—are decidedly fragmentary and disjointed when taken as a whole. This is perhaps to be expected, as they con...

I owe this book a longer review, because I struggled mightily with South and West (2017). Fourfalse starts it took me  to finish a book of mere 126 pages? I'm not from "the South". I spent all of one year living in Nashville, Tennessee some 40 years after Joan Didion drove through  cities, towns, and former Delta plantations in Louisiana and Mississippi. My location was urban, near a university, a self-described blue dot in a red sea. Yet, Didion's dismissive flippant, at times haughty remarks a...

Counterintuitively, Didion's lucid prose and her book's impressionistic structure synergize exceptionally well, making for a hazy reading experience that almost obscures South and West's total lack of purpose or argument.

The travel industry is largely made up of people talking about how wonderful a certain place or international program is, even if said place or program isn't all that wonderful. At one point in my life, to support myself and further my writing aims, I found myself working to further this deception — for an absolute pittance, which would appear to make the deception worse — but merely for the allure of the title. Until one particularly miserable experience where I could deceive no longer ... thus...

My introduction to Joan Didion's writing, and probably not the best place to start. This is essentially a collection of notes she made almost entirely during a trip she made with her husband to the Southern U.S., followed by a couple of pages of notes on California. I liked the prose in the "South" section, and enjoyed the little slices of life Didion captured through her observations. However I think it was a mistake to include the "West" part. This part was less well written because these were...