This title is likely to get some attention, as it did laying around my house, but the book I just read, Stoner (New York Review Books Classics) by John Williams is not about drugs at all; the main character William Stoner doesn’t event drink alcohol.
William Stoner moves from his modest family farm to attend the University of Missouri in 1910, initially to study agriculture but instead he falls in love with the study of English literature. He stays on to get his PhD, joins the faculty, and teaches for 40 years. This is a serious novel about a professor who experiences personal and professional agonies but also times of determination and exuberance.
In reading, there are some characters you are unlikely to forget – like those tailors I wrote about previously – and this book was recommended to me by the same friend Chris. Sometimes I feel like he should have the blog instead of me! Stoner, as he maneuvers his profession, is one of those characters you won’t forget.
“The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print — the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.”
With that said, this book is not for everyone. It was a slower read for me (though Chris says he read it in two days). But I strongly recommend this book to my “English major” friends and anyone else who when reading a book is willing to dive deep into the soul of a character instead of needing action to carry a plot along. It is an older book (1965) but not well known. I appreciated the setting of a university (author really taught at Missouri) and the love shown towards the library and literature and the profession of education.
“He saw [the future] as the great University library, to which new wings might be built, to which new books might be added and from which old ones might be withdrawn, while its true nature remained essentially unchanged.”