A Fall Book Recommendation from Relay
Stoner by John Williams
“There was a softness around him, and a languor crept upon his limbs. A sense of his own identity came upon him with sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.”
Relay’s own James Stinnett put out a well timed early Fall survival guide last week. It had me thinking on the turning of the seasons—how daily activities shift and shape around the amount of light left when we finish work for the day. One of those shifts for me, and hopefully for you readers (some of the statistics we have been referencing on reading in Every Friday are seriously worrying), is a typical increase in time spent reading while I cower inside my ice-cold house (she’s an old, well-loved house that struggles to stay warm on occasion) during the winter months.
I spent the weekend trying to come up with what I consider to be the most apt book for where we are all at during these seasonal changes.
I give you: Stoner by John Williams.
I discovered Stoner while searching for books similar to East of Eden by John Steinbeck (greatest novel I’ve ever read, see me in the comments please) and ended up opening it and, to my surprise, reading the entire thing cover to cover without getting up out of my chair. Something I have rarely done in the past.
We have some serious sci-fi and fantasy buffs in the Relay cohort (James, Macke). This book is not that. Not even a little. Maybe the nearly complete opposite, even. It follows William Stoner’s life from beginning to end. Born into a poor family in Missouri, he goes on to live a quite mundane, at times downright bleak, life as a university literature professor who is obsessed with his subject.
“A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure-as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been.”
As I felt while reading East of Eden, there is a real sense of connection to the character’s plight as you move through the book. This seems is in part due to the fact, along with the stunning writing in both novels, that many of the trials and tribulations are quite… real. The themes in Stoner being those of struggles with the realization at the fact that life can feel quite ordinary most days. These feelings become exacerbated as the seasons shift to what many deem the “happy” seasons to what most deem the “depressing” ones.
Some days, it really does suck when your hours in the 4 Hour Life are all spent in darkness (again, see James’s recommendations on combating that). I didn’t recommend this book to pull you out of that because I won’t sugar coat it; Stoner will likely not aid you in James’s quest to ward off the wintertime scaries. It will quite probably have the opposite effect while you’re reading it, accompanied by a period of sitting and contemplating all that has made up your life thus far as you approach the ending pages. Realizing there is still much purpose and meaning to be found in those ordinary (cold, wet, annoying) days, as William Stoner realizes, will be worth it.
“And we have come out of this, at least, with ourselves. We know that we are — what we are.”
Thanks for reading—or for mega scrolling all the way down here.
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Just did a speed run through this one last night coincidentally. 10/10.
adding to my list! 😁