In all my years I had never heard of John Williams the author. Yeah we have all heard of John Williams the composer.
The book was about the life of a college professor. It was not a story of triumph and success but rather a study of an average life of an average professor. However the book was excellently written.
I have posted a couple of quotes onto my Facebook page but these are the ones I like the most:
" In his extreme youth Stoner thought of love is an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he decided it was the heaven of the 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 state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified movement by movement and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and by the heart."
….
" He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life was worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him."
John Williams - Stoner
John Williams won a National Book Award for Augustus.
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