Mini Book Review

I went on Holiday to Greece earlier this year and had a fantastic time (thank you Club Mark Warner!). Whilst there I did the usual thing of bringing some books with me to read, and then lay by the pool reading them (just imagine the scene - the sun, a cooling sea breeze, the beach 3 yards away, the bar 2!). Idyllic.

After a few days Elaine commented on why I was reading two books at the same time (not simultaneously though) and was a bit surprised to find that it was because one of them was so good.

I'm not sure about you, but when I find a really fantastic book, and this is probably more the case when I'm on a weeks holiday, you don't want to finish it too quickly. Rather you want to take your time and savour it fully. Well Joan Didion's book "Where I Was From" is one of those books.

Part history of California, part personal family history, part political analysis, part social history and part autobiography - all woven together in a sort of timeline and with a point. This book gives a fantastic insight into why parts of America are how they are. And gives a good background to the phenomenon known as "The California dream".

It's not a "heavy" book, and is beautifully written in a very personal style that draws (or drew this reader) in to Joan Didion's life.

And her analysis of what happens to the people in the tract towns of the Sacramento Valley when the federal funding dries up has real resonance, for me, with Blair's Britain and what could be in store for us here.

I can't recommend this book highly enough, I'm just looking forward to when I feel I can read it again.