"The Young Man and the Sea" by Rodman Philbrick

Did I pick this up off the shelf at the library in the Junior Fiction section solely because the title is a nod to Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea?  Yes, yes, I did.  And then I read the whole thing in one sitting and enjoyed myself thoroughly!

While this does eventually retell Hemingway's story in a way, the first half of the book is totally different. Twelve-year-old Skiff's mother died recently, and his father is sunk deep into depression because of that.  Skiff tries to figure out a way to rouse his father out of his apathy, and he thinks maybe raising his father's sunken fishing boat will do the trick.  With the help of several old men, the young man does raise the boat and fix a hole in its bottom.

The boat needs a new engine, though, so Skiff sets about trapping lobster to earn the money that will cost.  But that doesn't work out the way he expects, so he decides to go out and catch himself a bluefin tuna, the biggest fish in the waters off Maine.  And that's when he begins his own one-on-one battle with a fish that closely parallels Hemingway's masterpiece... but with a much different ending.  I had tears in my eyes by the end of this book, it was so good.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for some juvenile humor and a youngster in danger.

"In Our Time" by Ernest Hemingway

 

Not my new favorite Hemingway, despite the presence of some of my favorite short stories of his.

In Our Time is a collection of vignettes about war and bullfighting that intersperse a lot of short stories, many of them featuring Hemingway's alter ego, Nick Adams.  The vignettes focus on gory, unpleasant, depressing events, and the short stories are similarly about death, loss, leaving, and things ending badly, all except the last two, which are "Big Two-Hearted River" parts 1 and 2. 

Only in those last two stories to we finally start to see someone finding peace and healing.  Until them, the focus seems to be on the elusiveness of happiness.  I think Hemingway is saying that you can't find happiness or healing when you're with other people, even your friends.  Only by going away from the rest of humanity can you find the peace and healing you need.  So bleak.  Oh, Hemingway, you make me so sad for you.

I think that young people today, the ones who are angry and railing against everything, should read Hemingway.  Especially this.  I think it would help them see that disaffection, disillusionment, and feeling lost and alone are not at all new.  They're present whenever people turn their backs on God and each other.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-16 for some bad language, violence, gore, oblique sexual references, and general depressingness.

This is my 2nd book read and reviewed for my third go-'round with the Classics Club and my 35th for #TheUnreadShelfProject2020.

Top Ten Tuesday: Crystal Ball

This week's Top Ten Tuesday prompt from That Artsy Reader Girl is "Books On My TBR I Predict Will Be 5-Star Reads."  I'm tweaking that a bit so it reflects my TBR shelves in particular.  I suspect I'm going to love:

1.  By-Line by Ernest Hemingway
2.  Crossfire Trail by Louis L'Amour
3.  Dear Readers and Riders by Marguerite Henry
4.  Flower Fables by Louisa May Alcott
5.  My Lost City by F. Scott Fitzgerald
6.  North to the Orient by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
7.  On Stories by C. S. Lewis
8.  The Story Girl by L. M. Montgomery
9.  Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
10.  Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell

(A favorite reading spot in our home, from my Instagram.)

How about you?  What books in your future are you expecting to love?  And have you read any of these?

"Shane" by Jack Schaefer (again)

I hadn't reread this since I led the read-along for it back in 2016, and I decided it was high time I revisited it.  I loved it even more this time through, if that's somehow possible.  Partly, of course, that's because I know how Alan Ladd residing so firmly in my head that I could envision him throughout the book, which was a delightful bonus.  

The story is deceptively simple.  At its core is a plot of comfortable familiarity:  a stranger rides in out of the unknown, and everything changes.  Which is basically my favorite plot, to be honest.  The Starrett family, Joe and Marian and their little boy Bob, live on a small, struggling farm in Wyoming.  They and their farmer neighbors have had difficulty with the big rancher across the river, but so far he and his cowboys have just been annoying, not overtly violent.

Into this uneasy situation rides a stranger, slim and lithe and obviously dangerous.  He says they can call him Shane, and although he is clearly not a farmer, he decides to stay on at the Starrett farm as their hired hand.  Together, he and Joe transform the farm into something to be proud of.  But his presence there tips the uneasy balance between the ranchers and the farmers, and his non-farmer skills make all the difference in the end.

What makes this story so rich and meaty is all the subtext, the emotions and fears and desires and hopes all simmering just under the dialog and actions of these four brave, bruised, stalwart people.  If Ernest Hemingway had ever written an actual western, it would have felt very similar to this.  This writing style feels to me so much like real life, when people hide their true thoughts and feelings behind masks, smile when they're sad, and keep their deepest wants and needs hidden.

The 1953 movie differs slightly here and there, but is the same in essence, and I adore it.  It plus one other movie are what made me an Alan Ladd superfan :-)

(Mine from Instagram)

Particularly Good Bits:

"What a man knows isn't important. It's what he is that counts" (p. 33).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for some violence and low-level bad language.

"The Torrents of Spring" by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway doesn't often make me laugh.  Not with his fiction, anyway.  Once in a while, he makes me cry.  But man alive, did I laugh over this little book!

On a whole, The Torrents of Spring reads like an inside joke.  Hemingway is poking fun at stuffy, pretentious writing, particularly that of his erstwhile friend Sherwood Anderson (so I've learned -- I wouldn't have gotten the Anderson connection without looking this book up online after I finished it).  It's elaborately structured, with four different parts each begun with these long quotations from Henry Fielding that are increasingly unrelated from the story itself.

The story talks about two men who work for a pump factory in Petoskey, Michigan.  The first man, Scripps O'Neill, falls in insta-love with the waitress at a "beanery," a short-order restaurant.  They announce that they're married, and the waitress spends the rest of the book worrying that she'll lose him to this other waitress.  She tries to hold onto him by subscribing to high-toned literary magazines and talking a lot about her childhood in England.

The other man, Yogi Johnson, is trying to find a woman that will interest him.  He used to be interested in women, but during the war, he was betrayed by a Parisian girl and can't seem to care about women anymore.  Until he meets a naked Indian Squaw, that is -- then he's interested, all right, and walks off into the spring night with her and her baby.

If all that doesn't sound like it makes a whole lot of sense, well, like I said, the whole book feels like an inside joke.  I laughed a lot over it because it was absurd, and also because Hemingway stuck all these little notes to the reader in it here and there.  Those were far and away my favorite part, and I'll re-read this one day just for them.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for some bad language and hinted-at adult situations.

This is my 13th book read and reviewed for my second go-round with The Classics Club, as well as my first for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2018.

"The Big Sleep" by Raymond Chandler

I always have a terrible problem when reading Raymond Chandler.  I want to zip through to the end because his mysteries are so gripping, but at the same time, I want to read them slowly so I can savor his writing.  I want to pause and relish the flavor of his words, roll them around in my head, revel in their distinctive wonder.  But I also want desperately to know what happens next.  Even though I've read all his novels and short stories before and vaguely remember how they go, I still get sucked straight into them.

The Big Sleep is the first thing by Raymond Chandler I ever read.  I read it in high school, in a collection of "great mysteries" that my parents had on a high shelf in our basement.  That collection was also my first introduction to Leslie Chartris' Simon Templar and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, and I devoured the collection secretly, stealing time to read between school assignments.  (I probably could have finished high school in two years if I hadn't done this sort of thing all the time.)

I have to admit, the first time I read this, around the age of 17, I just zipped through it and on to the next book in the collection.  I liked the noir feel of it, I knew Philip Marlowe was a famous detective, and I knew there was a movie version of this starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall that I'd been wanting to see for a while.  But I didn't exactly savor and relish and revel in the words.  Not yet. But eventually, I wised up.

What draws me to Chandler's novels, besides the perfect, unexpected, gleaming writing?  It's not the plots -- this one is twisted, yet thin, and Chandler himself admitted he had no idea who killed that poor chauffeur.  Nope, it's Philip Marlowe himself.  You know I have to want to be friends with the characters in a book if I'm going to love the book, and that is 100% the case here.  I would love to befriend Philip Marlowe.  He could use a good friend.  He's such a complex guy -- such a brilliant mix of cynicism and hope.  He has no faith in people, but he wishes that he did.  He's in a dirty business, but he's not a dirty guy.  As Chandler said in an essay about hardboiled mysteries, "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid."  That's Marlowe all over -- not mean, not afraid, and not tarnished by all the foul things he has to investigate, encounter, and do.  Man alive, I love that guy.  I once named a camera after him, actually.

And that's what separates Chandler from my other two favorite writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.  I admire all three of them for the way they write, but I also love what Chandler writes, whereas Fitzgerald and Hemingway's stories are generally not things I love.  (Yes, I'm the same person who just led a read-along of The Great Gatsby.  I don't love Gatsby, but I do enjoy that one, at least.  I enjoy a couple of Hemingway's too.)  Interesting that they were all writing in the early part of the 20th century.

I suppose I should mention what the plot of The Big Sleep is.  Well, there's this old millionaire with two badly behaved daughters.  He hires Marlowe to figure out who's blackmailing him about some gambling debts one of the daughters incurred.  But really he wants to know if his ex-son-in-law is behind it.  By the time Marlowe solves things, he'll have to deal with pornographers, murderers, extortionists, gamblers, and those wayward daughters.  All handled in a remarkably tasteful way, really.  Except for his homophobia -- that's not tasteful, but it's also not surprising given this was written in the 1930s.  Many modern readers would find it shocking, I'm sure.  Much as I love Marlowe, I admit he's not perfect.  He wouldn't be realistic if he was.

Particularly Good Bits:

Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness (p. 150).

I was as empty of life as a scarecrow's pockets (p. 159).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  A hard PG-13 for sexual matter handled in a non-explicit way, bad language, and violence.

I know a lot of people don't consider Chandler's books to be classics.  I do.  I think we'll be reading and marveling over them for hundreds of years, long after we've forgotten who lesser crime fiction authors ever were.  And I'm not just saying that out of loyalty to him because he's my favorite author -- I really think he's that good.  So this is my 11th book read and reviewed for my second go-round with The Classics Club.

This is also my 7th book read and reviewed for the Adventure of Reading Challenge hosted by Heidi Pekarek.

"The Merchant's Daughter" by Melanie Dickerson

So many of you have recommended Melanie Dickerson's fairy tale retellings to me over the past few years, and I have several of her books on my to-read list.  When the price for the e-book version of Dickerson's version of "Beauty and the Beast" dropped recently, I decided to give it a try.  And I read the whole thing in only three days, which necessitated a couple of extra battery rechargings for my phone.

So, yes, I definitely enjoyed this book!  The Beast, Lord Ranulf le Wyse, reminded me a lot of Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre, but with a less lurid past.  And the Beauty, Annabel, was a sweet blend of curious and patient.  She learned a good lesson about the importance of honest, and he learned not to expect others to judge him by his appearances.  I liked both of them a great deal, and if I should find this book in paperback at some point, I might just buy a copy.  (I infinitely prefer reading real books over battery-dependent e-books, and if I really like a book and know I will want to re-read it in years to come, I want that book on my physical bookshelves.)

I'm reading some Hemingway and Fitzgerald short stories right now too, for the high school lit class I'm teaching our niece, who is in ninth grade.  And I know I've said before, here and elsewhere, that while I absolutely love the way both those gentlemen write, I don't always love the stories they tell.  I bring this up, because The Merchant's Daughter was exactly the opposite for me -- the story and characters grabbed hold of me and wouldn't let go, but Dickerson's writing itself was pedestrian.  And that's okay -- I'm certainly no Hemingway or Fitzgerald myself.  I would have liked some more subtlety in the emotional changes within both characters, but my taste is not everyone's taste.

If I have one real quibble, it's that Lord le Wyse had an almost historically impossible grasp of God's love and forgiveness, the way that his grace extends to sinners.  The story is set in 1352, 165 years before the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, and while the parish priest holds the kinds of views I would expect in the pre-Reformation era, le Wyse is impossibly enlightened and Reformed in his understanding of Scriptures.  Dickerson talks in her Author's Note at the end about the research she did into Medieval England's judicial system and societal customs -- it's my opinion she would have done well to research Medieval theology as well.

Particularly Good Bits:

Her servant status could almost be a blessing.  This thought surprised her.  She'd felt abandoned by God, but maybe He had actually been taking care of her by sending her here.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-13 for repeated assaults against a woman's virtue, talk of women tempting men, and some discussion of feeling desire for others.  Nothing really risqué, as my mother would say, but also not appropriate for children.

This is my first book read and reviewed for Heidi Pekarek's Adventure of Reading Challenge!

Top Ten Tuesday: Historically Speaking

This week's prompt, from The Broke and the Bookish, is Top Ten Historical Settings You Love.

I love books set in the past, as you know by now.  Whether they were written long ago, or are what I consider to be "historical fiction" (set in a time prior to the age the author lived in), I love learning about how life was different in time gone by, and how it was also the same as what we have today.  People haven't changed much since the fall into sin, and that saying that "the more things change, the more they stay the same" definitely feels true when I'm reading historical fiction.

Anyway, here are the settings I'm most drawn to, in chronological order:

4000 BC-100 AD -- Biblical times.  I don't read a lot of fiction set then, though I do really love The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare and Ben-Hur:  A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace.  But I do read quite a bit of nonfiction about it -- right now, I'm working my way through When Christ Walked Among Us by James F. Pope.

500-1500 -- Middle Ages.  Basically anything involving Robin Hood, King Arthur, knights and ladies and castles.  The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle and so on.

1600s -- Elizabethan England.  If it involves Shakespeare, I'm interested.

1700s -- American Colonial Era and Revolution.  The Felicity books, The Light in the Forest by Conrad Richter, The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare, Sarah Bishop by Scott O'Dell, anything involving Daniel Boone.

1800s -- Napoleonic Wars, British Regency, American frontier life.  Jane Austen, Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series.  Streams to the River, Rivers to the Sea by Scott O'Dell, anything about Davy Crockett and Kit Carson.

1860s -- American Civil War.  Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, books by Shelby Foote, memoirs of soldiers, etc.

1870s-1900 -- American Old West.  My favorite era for movies, and the one I love writing in the most.  I'm very fond of Zane Grey, getting fonder of Louis L'Amour, and want to try out Max Brand.

1900s -- Victorian Era Britain.  I love Sherlock Holmes!

1920s -- the Jazz Age.  I love Fitzgerald and Hemingway, books by them or about them.  Especially The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast by Hemingway, and Tales of the Jazz Age and Flappers and Philosophers by Fitzgerald.  

1940s -- WWII.  Basically, anything set during WWII grabs my attention.  Sarah Sundin, Raymond Chandler, anything historical about WWII.  The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan, Shadows Over Stonewycke by Michael Phillips and Judith Pella, anything by Bill Mauldin or Ernie Pyle.


That's only 9, but that's all I've got :-)

EDIT:  No, it's not!  I realized that I was thinking mostly about fiction, but I do read non-fiction (and a bit of fiction) about Biblical times, so I'm adding that to the top of this list.

Top Ten Tuesday: Most-Read Authors

This week's theme from The Broke and the Bookish is "Top Ten Authors I've Read The Most Books From."  I've decided to list only authors I've read primarily as an adult, as otherwise my list would be entirely overrun by the likes of Ann M. Martin, Beverly Cleary, Franklin W. Dixon, Lois Gladys Leppard, and Marguerite Henry.

I'm listing these in alphabetical order by last name because for some of them I don't have an exact count on how many of their books I've read.

Jane Austen

I've read her six major novels, plus some of her juvenilia, Lady Susan and what there is of The Watsons and Sanditon.  My favorites are Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey.  I like Austen for her caustic wit, shrewd observations of human nature, and fully realized characters.

Raymond Chandler

Chandler is my absolute favorite author, so it's no surprise I've read all 7 1/2 of his novels (the 1/2 is cuz he never completed Poodle Springs, but Robert B. Parker did an entertaining job finishing it) and many of his short stories and essays.  I don't exactly have a favorite of his books, though I'm very fond of The Big Sleep, The Lady in the Lake, and Farewell, My Lovely.  I like Chandler for his surprising descriptions, acerbic dialog, and brisk pacing.

A. Conan Doyle

Of course by now you know I'm a devoted Sherlockian.  I read the entire canon in 12 months not long ago, but I'd read nearly all of it many times before.  I've also read The White Company, which is the only non-Holmes book of Doyle's I've read so far.  My favorite Holmes adventure is The Hound of the Baskervilles, and I also dearly love "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" and "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" and many of the other short stories.  I like Doyle for creating the coolest detective and chronicler ever and for his inscrutable but logical plots.

Ernest Hemingway

I almost didn't put Hemingway on here, but then I counted up how many of his books I've read and realized that I've read 6 1/2 of his books (Garden of Eden is unfinished) and all of his short stories, plus a good many of his essays and articles, so he belongs firmly on this list.  My favorites of his are The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast, and I'm quite fond of his Nick Adams stories too.  I like Hemingway for his terseness, his attention to detail, and his ability to make me understand characters who are very different from me.

Jan Karon

Reading Karon's books about Mitford is a little like making a visit home for me.  Why?  Because she set Mitford in the mountains of North Carolina and patterned parts of it after the town of Blowing Rock.  My family moved to NC's foothills when I was 12, and Blowing Rock quickly became one of our favorite places to visit, so much so that when Cowboy and I got married, we honeymooned there.  I haven't read the last few of her books, though I own all of them and look forward to beginning the series over again one of these days.  I've read the first six or seven, and am very fond of them.  I like Karon for her warm humor, quirky characters, and heartwarming storytelling.  

Laurie R. King

I've read all of King's novels of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes (my favorite is The Beekeeper's Apprentice), all of her Kate Martinelli mysteries (my favorite is To Play the Fool), several of her stand-alone novels (my favorite is Keeping Watch), and the first of her Stuyvesant & Grey books.  In fact, there are only 2 of her published novels I haven't read yet, and I'm kind of holding off on them so I have something to look forward to, other than her upcoming releases.  I like King for her strong female characters, exciting mysteries, and especially for her excellent characterization of Sherlock Holmes.

L. M. Montgomery

I've read all 8 of her Anne of Green Gables books numerous times, her Emily of New Moon series, and I'm currently reading a bunch of her short stories.  My favorites are Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Windy Poplars.  I like Montgomery for her happy endings, fanciful characters, and beautiful descriptions.

Patrick O'Brian

I have read all 20 of Patrick O'Brian's novels about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin's adventures in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars.  I also have his unfinished 21st book in the series, but I'm kind of saving it for when I reread the whole series.  I like O'Brian for the way he immerses me in a world I would otherwise never visit, and for the complex and endearing characters he created.

J.K. Rowling

I have, of course, read all the Harry Potter books.  And the book of stories by Beedle the Bard.  My favorite is Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, hands-down.  I like Rowling for her deft wordplay, humorous dialog, and ability to communicate hard truths simply and kindly.

Rex Stout

I'm not even sure how many I have read of Stout's mysteries featuring Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.  I know I've read 16 of the books I own, plus probably 6 or 8 more from the library over the years.  I've also read a couple of his non-Nero Wolfe mysteries, which were nice, but it's the characters of Archie and Nero that keep me coming back for more.  I like Stout for his snappy dialog, twisty mysteries, and memorable characters.

"F. Scott Fitzgerald On Writing" edited by Larry W. Phillips

This is a collection of things that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote or said about writing, whether it was in personal letters or in fiction.  They're organized into sections like "What a Writer Is," "Craft and Where It Comes From," and "Characters."  And it is chock full of beautiful insights and advice.  

I have a similar book called Ernest Hemingway on Writing from the same editor of writing quotes from Ernest Hemingway that I got maybe five or six years ago and also love.  When I read about this one on someone's blog (I thought it was Classics and Beyond, but I can't find the post now -- maybe Emily just mentioned it in a comments discussion?), I knew I wanted to read it.  And yet it took me a couple of years to get a copy and read it.  I've been savoring it for a couple of weeks, reading a section at a time and pondering the advice there.

Because I am a writer, I found this book invaluable, just as I did the Hemingway collection.  I want to make a poster or something with the best advice from both.  Maybe a desktop background for my laptop?  Fitzgerald and Hemingway both spent a great deal of time learning and refining their art, studying writing and pondering it, and they both imparted their acquired wisdom so helpfully :-)

Particularly Good Bits:

"That is part of the beauty of all literature.  You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone.  You belong" (p. 10).

"Good stories write themselves -- bad ones have to be written..." (p. 33).

"The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it (p. 107).

Fifty Classics Club Questions: 1-25

I've been lax about joining in the Classics Club monthly discussions and memes and such for a while, but I really love filling out surveys and answering questions, so there's no way I'm missing this one!  It's REALLY LONG, though, so I'm splitting it into two parts.  Here's the first half!

1.  Share a link to your club list.  Link!

2.  When did you join The Classics Club? How many titles have you read for the club? I joined on January 4, 2014, and I've read 15 so far.

3.  What are you currently reading?  Middlemarch by George Eliot, Light of the Western Stars by Zane Grey, and In the Company of Sherlock Holmes edited by Laurie R. King & Leslie S. Klinger.  The latter isn't for the Classics Club, but they didn't specify, so I'm mentioning it :-)

4.  What did you just finish reading and what did you think of it?  I just finished Daddy Long-Legs by Jean Webster and I loved it!  Review coming soon.

5.  What are you reading next? Why?  A Decent, Orderly Lynching by Frederick Allen.  It's research for my next novel.

6.  Best book you've read so far with the club, and why?  The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien.  It's so rich and complex and fully realized.

7.  Book you most anticipate (or, anticipated) on your club list?  By-Line:  Ernest Hemingway.  I read the first fifty pages or so last year and really want to start it all over and read the rest.

8.  Book on your club list you've been avoiding, if any? Why?  To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, because I read Mrs. Dalloway years ago and it gave me headaches.  But I want to be fair and give Woolf another chance.

9.  First classic you ever read?  I have no idea.  I've been reading classics for as long as I've been reading.

10.  Toughest classic you ever read?  Hardest to get through would probably be Mrs. Dalloway, as mentioned before.  It gave me headaches, literal, actual headaches.  I only stuck with it because I'd really liked The Hours, movie and book, and wanted to know how it all tied together with that book.

11.  Classic that inspired you?  Too many to count.  Most recently, probably Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which made me see how much more interesting my prose could be.

...or scared you?  The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  I don't read a lot of horror, but the illustration of our sinful nature given a grotesque life of its own was pretty scary.

...made you cry?  Betsy-Tacy by Maud Hart Lovelace.

...made you angry?  The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, though I was more annoyed than angry.  With myself, for not liking it as well as everyone else I know.

12.  Longest classic you've read?  Ever?  Les Miserables.

...longest classic left on your club list?  Probably Middlemarch, which I'm working through slowly with a friend.

13.  Oldest classic you've read?  Again, I'm taking this to mean ever, not just since I started the challenge.  I've read parts of The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer.

...oldest classic left on your club list?  Don Quixote

14.  Favorite biography about a classic author you've read — or, the biography on a classic author you most want to read, if any?  I really love A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's autobiography about his life in Paris.

15.  Which classic do you think EVERYONE should read? Why?  I hate this sort of question.  There is no one fictional book that everyone in the world should read or would like.  Pass.

16.  Favorite edition of a classic you own, if any?  I love my copy of The Lord of the Rings so much I wrote a whole blog post about it, which you can read here.

17.  Favorite movie adaption of a classic?  At the risk of beating a drum too often here, I love Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies.

18.  Classic which hasn't been adapted yet (that you know of) which you very much wish would be adapted to film.  Well, Jane Austen's Persuasion has been adapted several times, but never to my liking, so I wish they would make a better adaptation.

19.  Least favorite classic? Why?  Hmm.  Probably The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner.  I couldn't finish it.

20.  Name five authors you haven't read yet whom you cannot wait to read.  Leo Tolstoy, Anne Bronte, John Le Carre, T. H. White, and James Fenimore Cooper.

21.  Which title by one of the five you've listed above most excites you and why?  Probably T.H. White's The Once and Future King, mostly because it gets mentioned a bunch in X-Men 2.  And I love King Arthur stuff anyway.

22.  Have you read a classic you disliked on first read that you tried again and respected, appreciated, or even ended up loving? (This could be with the club or before it.)  The first time I read The Old Man and the Sea I didn't like it at all.  But when I reread it to prepare for the read-along I hosted this summer, I liked it quite well :-)

23.  Which classic character can't you get out of your head?  Hamlet is always with me.

24.  Which classic character most reminds you of yourself?  Hmm.  Jo March from Little Women, probably.

25.  Which classic character do you most wish you could be like?  Jean Valjean from Les Miserables, because he's so pure and forgiving.

More to come!  Probably not until after Thanksgiving, though :-)  I do intend to finish it off before the end of the month.  Meanwhile... Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends!  And a very merry unbirthday to everyone else :-)

"Ernest Hemingway: Complete Poems" edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis

If you're surprised to learn that Hemingway wrote poetry, well, I was too!  In fact, until a few weeks ago, I didn't even know he wrote poetry.  But then I stumbled on this book, or mention of it somewhere, and promptly got it from the library and read it.

If you're not interested in Ernest Hemingway as a writer or a person, you probably don't need to read this book.  As a window into what he was thinking and feeling at different times in his life, these poems are interesting, but as poetry they range from thought-provoking to silly to odd.  I found the notes on the poems, what was going on when he wrote them and such, more interesting than most of the poems.

My favorite was a very short poem that made me smile.  I'm going to reprint it here and hope I don't get into copyright trouble.  If I do, I'll take it down.

"[I'm off'n wild wimmen...]
I'm off'n wild wimmen
An Cognac
An sinnin'
For I'm in loOOOOOOOve.

And if that makes you think, "Hmm, that doesn't sound like what I'd expect from Hemingway," let me assure you most of the poetry is not at all like that.  That's just the one that I liked best.  It's from around 1922, in Paris, and so boyish and sweet I can't help but smile at it.

Some of his poetry was easy to understand, some of it was hard, some was traditional, some was very modern.  A very interesting mix, for sure!

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-13 for language and themes of war and violence.

This is my 14th book read and reviewed for the I Love Library Books Challenge.

"The Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway

I first read this between my freshmen and sophomore years of college.  I read it directly after The Sun Also Rises, which had entranced me.  In comparison, The Old Man and the Sea disappointed me.  Especially since it is so very famous -- I expected it to be amazing, earth-shattering, life-altering.  And it wasn't.  My expectations for it were so high, after spending so many years reading about how influential and game-changing this story is, that finding out it's a slender, slippery, almost ephemeral story... I felt kind of cheated the first time I read it.  (Basically the same thing happened the first time I read Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.  Expectations are not always a good thing.  For me, anyway.)

So I decided I disliked The Old Man and the Sea.  I didn't stop liking Hemingway, and I've read a lot of his novels and short stories since then.  I love his memoir, A Moveable Feast.  But I was firmly convinced TOMATS was overrated and dull.  I never intended to read it again.

But then it kept coming up on blogs I read.  I would mention I like Hemingway, someone would say, "Ugh, I can't stand Hemingway."  I'd ask what they'd read by him, and most of the time, the answer was, "Just The Old Man and the Sea."  So I'd say, "Yeah, I hated that too.  Try something else!  He's not all like that."  But I started to wonder... would I still hate it?  Now that I've read more of Hemingway's works than one novel?  Now that I knew what to expect from it?  Or was it still not to my taste?  

And that's why I'm holding this read-along.  To explore what made this story so influential, why so many people dislike it, and to discover whether or not I still dislike it myself.

To my surprise, I rather enjoyed it.  It's not my favorite book, by any means, but this time around, I found it poignant and uplifting.  A lot of people think Hemingway is depressing, and some of his books do end on a down note (for instance, my two least-favorite of his novels, A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls), but I think TOMATS ended positively.  Although the old man lost the fish's meat and thus couldn't sell it, he still had the evidence of its skeleton to show everyone what a big fish he had single-handedly caught.  And he had the personal satisfaction of being defeated only by sharks, never by his prey or is own self.

For me, the book revolves around the idea of endurance.  The old man, Santiago, endures so much on a daily basis that would drive me nuts!  Hunger, cold, mockery, defeat... and that's before he hooks the biggest fish he's ever seen and endures pain and thirst and cold and shark attacks.  Who can endure the most, him or the fish?  Obviously, it's him -- he outlasts the fish, plain and simple.  At the end, the boy named Manolin tells him, "You must get well fast for there is much that I can learn and you can teach me everything.  How much did you suffer?" (p. 126).  I think that's very telling -- that he mentions learning and suffering in the same breath.  He must learn to endure suffering, and the old man knows how to endure absolutely anything.

Do I think this story is an allegory?  No, I don't.  Mostly because Hemingway said over and over that it wasn't, but also because of something J.R.R. Tolkien says in his introduction to The Fellowship of the Ring:

"I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author."

If this was an allegory, then surely there would be only one interpretation of the story.  The old man is a writer, the fish is a story, catching the fish is the struggle of writing a story, the sharks are critics who rip the story to shreds.  But what if the old man is a cook?  The fish is the meal he's making, catching it is the struggle to get everything ready all at once, the sharks are the people who eat it and then don't bother to say thanks.  Or the old man is a mother, the fish is the child she's raising, the struggle is all the work she puts into raising that kid, and the sharks are all the outside influences that try to lure her child away from her.  

You can apply this story to so very many people and situations that, for me anyway, the idea of it as an allegory doesn't work.  For me, anyway.  Are there symbols here?  Sure.  The old man is anyone struggling to do or create or perform something difficult.  The fish is the end product they're struggling toward.  The struggle is, well, their struggle.  The sharks are the opposition that can destroy someone's work or creation.  

Or, as Hemingway said, the old man is just an old man and the fish is just a fish -- you can read it as a straight story of a stubborn, sturdy old man, and it's totally enjoyable that way too.

As for the writing style here, it's a bit different from his other works, but not vastly.  In a letter to Charles Scribner in 1951, he said of this story, "This is the prose that I have been working for all my life that should read easily and simply and seem short and yet have all the dimensions of the visible world and the world of a man's spirit."*  I think it's a bit more studied than his other novels -- there are very few contractions, and the sentences are very simple and straight-forward, for the most part.  I think it works really well because the old man himself is a simple and straight-forward character, and since the story is told from his point of view, the style serves to reinforce the character.  Is it my favorite writing style?  No.  I like his writing much better in A Moveable Feast and By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, but I think it serves his purposes well here.  I did wish he had used a few more commas, though.

Particularly Good Bits:

The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like flag of permanent defeat (p. 9).

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated (p. 10).

I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures (p. 66).

He took all his pain and what was left of his strength and his long gone pride and he put it against the fish's agony and the fish came over onto his side and swam gently on his side, his bill almost touching the planking of the skiff and started to pass the boat, long, deep, wide, silver and barred with purple and interminable in the water (p. 93).

"But man is not made for defeat," he said.  "A man can be destroyed but not defeated" (p. 103).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  G.  One of the cleanest Hemingway stories I've ever read.

This is my thirteenth book read and reviewed for The Classics Club.  It is also my entry for my The Old Man and the Sea read-along, which you can join here.

*I found this quote in an awesome book called Ernest Hemingway On Writing by Larry W. Phillips.

"The Old Man and the Sea" Read-Along

Good morning!  And welcome to the read-along of Hemingway's most famous* story, The Old Man and the Sea.  I'm so glad you could join me!  I think we're going to have some fun, learn a few things from each other, and maybe even make some new friends.

So here's how this will work:  Each of us will read TOMATS and then post our own reviews on our own blogs.  Below, you'll find a list of my suggestions for things you might want to discuss in your reviews, but of course you can choose what you want to write about.  And below those, you'll find a linky widget.  Once you've got your review written, paste your name and your post's URL in the widget.  Then follow the links to read everyone else's reviews and discuss what they thought in their comments!  That last part is very important, because that's how we can do all that fun and learning and friend-making, so please don't forget!

I'll post my own review in a day or so, and link to it on the list too.

Possible Discussion Questions:

+  Have you read The Old Man and the Sea before?  If so, did you like it more or less after this reading than you did before?

+  Have you read any of Hemingway's other works?  If so, how do you like this compared to some of his other writings?

+  What do you think the main point of the story is?  What is Hemingway trying to say here?

+  Some people say this story is full of symbolism, maybe even an allegory.  What do you think things like the old man, the fish, and the sharks could symbolize?

+  In 1952, Hemingway wrote a letter to his friend Bernard Berenson in which he said:  "There isn't any symbolysm [sic].  The sea is the sea.  The old man is an old man.  The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish.  The shark are all sharks no better and no worse."**  Do you think he was telling the truth, or being cagey?  Do you think that sometimes an audience can see more in a story than its author does? 

+  What do you think of the writing style Hemingway uses here?  Do you like it?  How does it add or detract from the story?

+  The Old Man and the Sea is required reading at a lot of high schools.  Do you think this is a good choice for teen readers?  Do you think some other story or book by Hemingway might be a better introduction to his work?

Okay, like I said, you can answer as many or as few of those questions as you like.  You can do a straight question-and-answer post by copying them, or you can just write a review that touches on those things, whatever.  Totally up to you!  When you're done with your review, please link to it here. 




*I have no basis for this claim, I just feel like it's the one everyone's heard of or read.
**I found this quote in an awesome book called Ernest Hemingway On Writing by Larry W. Phillips.

Regarding a Read-Along of "The Old Man and the Sea"

I've decided to do it!  Enough people have expressed interest in doing a read-along of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea with me that I'm going to host it.  We'll kick things off on July 21, which is Hemingway's birthday.  And by which time, I do hope I'll be done with the Lord of the Rings read-along :-)  

I'm not sure yet exactly how I'll do this particular read-along, as it's really just one long short story, with no chapter breaks or even section breaks.  Maybe a post for plot, another for characterization, another for imagery, another for style?  One huge post about ALL of it?  I don't know!  Going to be an adventure.  If you have any suggestions, shout 'em out!

In the meantime, if you're interested in participating, or just want to add a nice picture to your blog, please consider adding one of these to your sidebar with a link back to this post:

Thanks!  I'll probably see if I can get this listed at The Classics Club too.

"The Sun Also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway

If I needed to sum up this story and these characters in one word, it would be 'desire.'  If I were permitted two words, I would add 'disappointment.'

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  I meant to say first that this is the first Hemingway novel I ever read.  I'd read a short story or two in high school, and during my freshman year at college, my friends and I watched City of Angels (1998) a lot.  Hemingway's memoir A Moveable Feast figures prominently in the movie, and I decided to read it once school was done.  But when I got home that summer, I discovered my library didn't have it.  They did have this, and the quote from Ecclesiastes inside intrigued me, so I checked it out.  I can still remember that copy, old and rebound in that funny, rough hardcover stuff libraries used to use.  Bright orange.  I felt so intellectual, reading Ernest Hemingway at nineteen.  Reading and enjoying him.

I didn't quite get everything that was going on, that first time through.  Or rather, I didn't quite get that the protagonist, Jake Barnes, had been emasculated by a war wound.  I knew he'd been wounded, I knew he was angry and disappointed about things, but Hemingway implies everything about the wound, in his inimitable way, and I didn't figure it out.  Not that it mattered, because I was perpetually drunk on his prose.  Hemingway was unlike any writer I'd encountered up to that point -- strong, evasive, beautiful, ugly, and with such a feeling of truth running under everything.

Okay, back to 'desire' and 'disappointment.'  From here on, there are spoilers. 

As I said, Jake Barnes was wounded in WWI in such a way that he's no longer able to have sex.  He's a foreign correspondent for some American newspaper, living in Paris in the expatriate community.  And he's in love with Lady Brett Ashley, a divorcee with a fondness for alcohol and sex.  She's almost in love with him too, but because he can't fulfill her desires, she knows she'd never truly be happy with him.  So she is engaged to a guy named Mike, but goes off on a trip with another guy named Cohn, and then dumps him, and later takes up with a bullfighter and has a fling with him instead.  And Jake tries not to be miserable during all that.

Like I said, it's all about desires and disappointment.  Jake and Brett desire each other, but can't do anything about it.  Mike and Cohn and the bullfighter desire Brett, but are all disappointed when she leaves them for someone else.  Brett desires them too, but they all disappoint her one way or another.  In the end, no one really gets what they want.  Jake at least seems to understand that what he wishes could have been between him and Brett might not have been as wonderful as they can always imagine it would have been.

And if that sounds sordid and depressing, you're not wrong.  Or right.  It's not completely sordid in that Hemingway never actually uses the word 'sex' or describes anything of that nature, other than that sometimes characters kiss each other.  Everything else is implied -- even the characters talk around it.  And it's not completely depressing because by the end, I feel like Jake at least has come to accept what can and can't be and can move forward with his life a bit.

My one quibble with Hemingway's writing is that he often does these long conversations with not enough dialog tags, so I have to go back and reread parts to figure out who's saying what.  But I've become resigned to that issue, as his writing delights me otherwise.  

Particularly Good Bits:

"I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it" (p. 18).

"You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another" (p. 19).

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing (p. 42).

He was the archivist, and all the archives of the town were in his office.  That has nothing to do with the story (p. 102).

"Good.  Coffee is good for you.  It's the caffeine in it.  Caffeine, we are here" (p. 120).

The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta.  Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences.  It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta (p. 158).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-13 for language, alcohol use, oblique references to sex, and violence.

EDIT:  I forgot to mention there are some racist comments made about Jews, and the "n" word gets used in a matter-of-fact way, not as a slur.  Remember, this was written almost 90 years ago, when things were a lot different.

This is my eighth book read and reviewed for the Classics Club, and my fifth for the I Love Library Books challenge.