I started Stoner on 17 February 2024 and finished it on the 22nd. The same day I opened Reddit and wrote one of only two posts I’ve ever made on r/books. It began, “I don’t know how to describe what I’m feeling right now after reading the last few lines of this book.”

Stoner isn’t one of those glamorous books that gets thrown around in every list and every video. It’s the kind that finds you when the time is right, and it found me one afternoon on Amazon, while I was scrolling for my next read.

The strange thing is that the book tells you everything at the start. William Stoner goes to university, a seminar on English literature makes him want to teach, he marries the wrong woman, he lives a quiet, uneventful life, and he dies. It’s all there on the first page, and I never thought I could be so caught up in a story I’d already been told the ending of. But you read on anyway, and it gets to you.

I think it got to me because my own life is fairly uneventful too. Nothing dramatic happens in it, and the big moments, when they come, are quiet ones. The book made me think about the significance of one ordinary life, with its ups and downs, its joys and sorrows, and it didn’t let me look away. Williams doesn’t offer an answer, and I don’t have one either. He just holds the question in front of you for nearly three hundred pages. It made me look differently at my own small decisions, the conversations I didn’t have and the directions I didn’t take, and at how a life gradually becomes what it is.

The part I still think about is how he gets passed over. Stoner refuses to let Charles Walker, a student who hasn’t done the work, through his oral exam, and Walker happens to be the protégé of Hollis Lomax, who goes on to run the department. Lomax never forgives him. For years after that, Stoner is qualified for more and gets less, kept off the courses he wants and away from the position he’s earned, while the man who decides these things holds a grudge. It’s one of the most ordinary injustices in the book, and it’s the one that got to me.

Academia is hardly the only place it happens. Nepotism and favouritism are everywhere now. People used to feel at least slightly ashamed of them, but lately it’s become a badge of honour to tell others you got something for a reason other than hard work. In the 21st century, hard work may be less than half of what gets you up the career ladder. The rest depends on networking, social media and whatnot. It’s a world made by extroverts for extroverts, and if you’re not one, you have to jump through hoops for even a simple achievement.

For a post about a book, it did well. It’s been seen 153,000 times, nearly half of them from the United States, with 182 upvotes and 39 comments, which is a lot of attention for a 1965 novel about a farm boy who becomes an English teacher.

The comments were the best part. One reader quoted my line about relating to Stoner because my life was uneventful too, and said that was exactly why it was the most beautiful book. Most of us grow up thinking we’re going to do incredible things, they wrote, and later find ourselves looking back at the crossroads and wondering “what if”. Another wrote that Stoner was a good and honourable man, but what stood between him and a more fulfilling life was himself. A third said that even a life that looks completely uneventful on the surface is full of beautiful moments. And then someone asked how it compared to Moby-Dick, and someone else replied, “Shorter, less whales.” Two people suggested books in the same vein, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I haven’t read either yet, but Ivan Ilyich is on my list for next year.

There’s something fitting about the book’s own story. When it came out in 1965 it sold about 2,000 copies and disappeared. Williams died in 1994, long before it found its readers. In 2006, New York Review Books brought it back as a classic, and in 2013, nearly fifty years after it was first published, Waterstones named it their book of the year. It’s a novel about a man whose life looked insignificant until someone took the time to look closely, and that’s more or less what happened to the novel too.

It found me one afternoon on Amazon. Maybe it’ll find you the same way.