I am halfway through my second read of Stoner, and I still don't know what to think of William Stoner, and I think that's deliberate to portray a complex human that can be in the world in contradictory ways. That's all I will say out of fear of spoiling anything.

This sentence from the first page is what piqued my interest in the book: "Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers." I thought, "Why write about him then? There must be something here.". I was not disappointing. :)