Ernest Hemingway

Aren't the odds you'll like a book higher if you've already enjoyed a book by the same author?

 

Enjoyment isn't my main goal in reading.

 

Also, not counting school assignments, I've read very few books that I didn't love. I know my general tastes and only read highly regarded books.

 

Even for fiction? What is your main goal?

 

Well, I do read for enjoyment, but I gain that enjoyment more out of dissecting the writing and analyzing the writer's choices in diction and pacing and plot twists. It's not about a good story for me.

 

I've met the man's nephew.
I've had a drink in three of his favorite bars.

I have family in a city that hosted a Hemingway symposium last year. A lot of scholars came into town for it, most of whom had written many, many words about the man, and not all of whom completely understood him. For instance in the Nick Adams stories there is a reference to black squirrels. One woman thought it was a squirrel who represented evil. Nope. Black squirrels are a real thing and are native to northern-lower Michigan, the area from which Hemingway drew inspiration for those stories.

I still love some of the stories about him more than his stories (even though I did like everything of his I've read). For instance in "Is Paris Burning" there are several Hemingway stories, like how he recruited a French Resistance unit in the span of about 48 hours and 'liberated' a Paris bar.

 

I love Hemingway because I would love to have lived the life he did ... right up until that whole pesky shotgun incident. You can't do what he did in today's world.
Hemingway's work is simple and straight forward. Maybe there are some underlying themes there that I never get out of any (author/book,song, movie, etc.). For instance, if someone is writing about black squirrels, I don't search for a hidden meaning. I take it to mean he is talking about tree-dwelling rodents with black fur.

Visiting Key West, Hemingway's home, and the bars where he drank was great. I have a picture of him in my home and a big poster in my classroom.

I like to put myself into his books, into his adventures ... Paris, Key West, Cuba, Spain.

Lady Brett Ashley is a whore.

 

Hemingway owns Faulkner.

 

SJ - I think you hit on something. When people say they admire Hemingway
more often than not it's about the life he lead as opposed to his writing.

 

Having looked at a painting/sculpture by a given artist, how can you justify looking at another painting/sculpture by that artist? I mean, having seen Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, is it worth squandering a chance to look at another artist's work just to take a peek at Guernica?

 

It also bothers me that I won't ever read all of the books I want to read, so I find myself very selective because I feel I don't have time to waste on crap. Unfortunately, that also makes me somewhat conservative in book selection and overly reliant popular opinion.

Certain authors appealed to me so much, there was no way I wasn't going to read them thoroughly.

 

Paris Review FB page:

All of Tolstoy’s works are going online. “We wanted to come up with an official website that will contain academically justified information,” explains his great-great-granddaughter. The work on the site will have been triple-proofed by more than 3,000 volunteers from some forty-nine countries.

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/09/06/tolstoy-goes-digital-and-other-news/

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20130905/183191485/All-of-Tolstoys-Works-Are-Online-for-Free--Descendant.html