This is a kind of book I've been wanting to find for years.

The book isn't driven by drama or suspense. Nothing particularly good or bad happens. It's just a book about a man. And in a larger sense, it's about life, and it's many disappointments. It's about learning. It's about death. Of course, it's also about early 20th century stoicism.

Another review joked that a good alternate title would be "Life sucks and then you die."

The thing I love is that there's no fairy tale. It's not trying to sell you on anything. It's just a book about a man, and not a particularly interesting man.

Somehow it's not depressing, despite the fact that it's very depressing. I think it's because it's comforting. Because nobody's life ever goes the way they expect it to, but it's not really something we talk about in any real way. We all kind of live with this quiet feeling that's we've failed, or that we've been failed but it's nobody's fault. Stoner is much more resigned than I could imagine anyone being today, but this book really embodies a feeling. It's not about the characters or the plot, it's about all the things we don't say, all the paths we don't follow. But there's no lesson. It just is what it is. Even if you do everything you can to not be like Stoner, you can't escape the fact that you don't really know what you're doing, and you don't have all that much control, and you can't predict what will happen. Life is a puzzle you will never solve. We look to other people and society, and we make our best guess as to what to do and then whatever happens happens. More often than not it's probably not what we were hoping for.

I totally get why someone might pick this up and be like, "Why would anyone like this?" but it's refreshing. It's the opposite of escape. It's just a boring man experiencing 45 years of quiet disappointment and I love it.

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.

This is one of those books I really didn't want to finish.