#32 in Literary fiction
Play It as It Lays
- 214
- Pages
- about 4 h
- Reading time
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Our view
Joan Didion’s “Play It as It Lays” is a dark, unsettling novel of Hollywood emptiness that still feels startlingly contemporary. It stays inside the mind of its heroine, Maria, amid the hollow glamour of 1960s Los Angeles, and what it leaves behind is a state of mind more than a sequence of events. At just over two hundred pages it is short, and bleak.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Play It as It Lays is a 1970 novel by American writer Joan Didion. Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. The novel has been credited for helping define modern American fiction and has been described as an "instant classic". It is known for depicting the nihilism and the illusory glamour of life in Hollywood, as well as capturing the landscape and culture of 1960s Los Angeles.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.6 across 153 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 51% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Literary fiction average of 8.1. That is how 7.9 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.7 | 12 | 8% |
| Hardcover | 7.6 | 141 | 92% |
Frequently asked
How long is Play It as It Lays?
It has 214 pages — shorter than 84% of the ranked books in Literary fiction.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Literary fiction — with scores between 7.7 and 8.1, closest to this book.
