The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

It was not long after that everybody was twenty-six. It became the period of being twenty-six.

[N]o artist needs criticism, he only needs appreciation. If he needs criticism he is no artist.

I absolutely could not enjoy the first half of the book. The endless discussion of art and artists had me crawling up the walls. It was when The War happened that she begins describing what their life without the artists was like that I got engaged in the writing and the style. Partly because I recognised the characters and knew their writing, partly because it was not so much about their writing as it was about that period of ex-patriot Americans that I find so fascinating.

The only reason I read this was to knock another book off the Modern Library Non-Fiction list and I'm beginning to think that's not exactly the best motivation for reading a book. I found some appreciation in the last 100 pages, but not really enough to make this a book that I'll keep returning to to find more nuggets of wisdom.