Didion, Woolf, and Baldwin: Exempted excerpts

"I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards--their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble--the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, "'Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.' " -Virginia Woolf, "How Should One Read a Book?" (245)

I realized that I've been meaning to read three collections of essays, Joan Didion's The White Album, Virginia Woolf's The Second Common Reader, and James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son just in order to read, respectively, "The White Album," "How Should One Read a Book?", and the title essay of Baldwin's collection. I know that someday I would like to read these books in their entirety, but because of the ambition of my reading list, I'd like to bench these three collections, having read the essays I was most excited for. It's probably a mortal sin to not finish these magnificent, heralded books (The New York Times called Woolf "as nearly perfect as Heaven grants it to a critic to be" upon the 1932 publication of The Second Common Reader), but I'm confident I will come back to them soon. For now, consider them enjoyed, appreciated, and checked off the List. (Postscript: After reading and loving Native Son, I may have to get my own copy of Notes of a Native Son; I feel like I could connect to Baldwin's essays deeply right now.)

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be 'interesting' to know which. ...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience." -Joan Didion, "The White Album" (11)