John Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner probably would not have been on my reading radar without booktube. It seemed as though many young readers (people in their 20s and 30s – and yes, those are young people to me now) were reading it and talking about it and so I added it to my physical tbr pile, figuring that I would get to it eventually.

Back in November when my friend (and former student) Luke and his wife, Lauren, were making their plans to come home for a visit over the holidays, they suggested a book club of three. Whenever we see each other, we always spend a lot of time talking about books and so this seemed like a good idea. I perused my shelves and suggested five titles, Stoner among them, and so that is where we landed.

Stoner is the story of William Stoner, son of impoverished Missouri farmers, who goes off to college ostensibly to take an agriculture degree, but who ends up taking a different path altogether. When the professor, Sloan, reads a sonnet and says “Mr. Shakespeare speaks to you across three hundred years, Mr. Stoner; do you hear him?”, Stoner falls in love. I also fell in love… with this book.

The novel follows Stoner through his undergraduate degree, his post graduate work, his early marriage to Edith, academic politics, the birth of his daughter, his affair. Williams doesn’t spend an inordinate amount of time at any of these road stops in Stoner’s life and yet somehow we come to know him very well.

Anybody who loves literature would find touchstones in this book and, indeed, in Stoner’s own life.

Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him an awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.

Luke, Lauren, and I could all relate to the feeling of anxiety at how little we will actually be able to read over the course of our lives, and Williams managed to capture that exact feeling. I think Luke and Lauren read far more deeply that I ever did at their age. (Luke is enrolled in a PhD of Philosophy and is currently reading Proust; Lauren is a research scientist at Harvard, about to start her own PhD. You might wonder what they are doing giving up precious family time to hang out with me; I wonder the same thing myself. :-)) Even if I have read upwards of 2000 books over the course of my life, lots of them were crap.

I also had another point of intersection with Stoner, and that was his feelings about teaching.

Always, from the time he had fumbled through his first classes of freshman English, he had been aware of the gulf that lay between what he felt for his subject and what he delivered in the classroom.

Sometimes Stoner feels like he is doing a great job and sometimes he feels like everything he does is crap and that is a feeling I have experienced over the course of my career. Of course, he is teaching at university and I am a high school teacher, so there’s that.

We had quite a lively discussion about Edith’s role in Stoner’s life, too. Lauren was a lot more sympathetic about her; Luke and I hated her. She never seemed like the right person for Stoner, and she did a lot of damage to his relationship with his daughter. It was hard to see anything positive about her at all. Did she redeem herself at all in the end? Not in my opinion.

Stoner is a book that gets you thinking about so many things – what makes a life? chief among them? In the end, all three of us agreed that it was a fantastic book and a made for a great first book club of three discussion.

Highly recommended.