Stephen, etc.

• "Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?"

  –From The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
  2 notes

• The Sun Also Rises

  By Ernest Hemingway (1926)

  This was my first Hemingway novel, and it took me a long, long time to settle in. It wasn’t until the novel reached the Festival of Fermín that the story began to flow, and that was more than halfway through. Even then, I didn’t feel like I understood Hemingway. His dialog, in particular, constantly took me out of the story. Perhaps I’ll try to reread this later.

  For most of the novel, I felt like Hemingway should have stuck to the short story. I’ve only read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” years ago, and I liked it. The compression of the smaller format created a tension that I never felt in this novel. I think I’ll wait a while before I read the second Hemingway novel I own.

  With this read, I’ve decided to finally tackle Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. I know it’ll make me unbelievably sad at times, but I’ve put off the book for so long, always telling myself that the timing wasn’t right. When I think about it, I don’t really know what the right time would be. So I’m reading it now.

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