The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Originally published in 1926
Source: my husband's college copy

The Sun Also Rises is the story of Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley, Robert Cohn and an assortment of other expatriates as they travel from their wild lives in Paris to the bullfights of Pamploma, Spain in the 1920's. Although the story is primarily about the interaction of these people, it is also an homage to Hemingway's passions.

The overview on the Barnes & Nobel calls The Sun Also Rises poignant, a word that I initially took issue with in reference to this book. My idea of the definition of "poignant" tended to be "profoundly moving, touching." I know this book is considered a masterpiece - any source you look at will tell you as much. But I definitely did not find it profoundly moving nor touching. Poignant, however, can also be defined as "neat, skillful and to the point," "piercing, incisive," and "keenly distressing to the mind." By any of those definitions, The Sun Also Rises is indeed poignant.

"Neat, skillful and to the point"
Hemingway may be the ultimate in "to the point" authors. When writing dialogue, he has almost entirely done away with the "he said, she cried, John extolled" pieces. The reader must pay attention in order to know who is saying what.

Whereas writers up to the time of the Lost Generation tended to be overly descriptive, Hemingway is very careful about when he uses description. I haven't much of a clue what any of the characters in this book look like, unless other characters have pointed out something about their features. Hemingway clearly preferred to let the reader form an image of his characters based almost entirely on their actions. He seemed to be of a different mind frame when it came to his passions - the streets of Paris, the countryside of Spain, fishing and bullfighting are all vividly portrayed (although certainly not in any way that might be considered flowery). 

"Piercing, incisive"
While Hemingway may leave the reader to wonder about his characters appearance, he leaves the reader in no doubt whatsoever about their motivations, their biases, not their feelings, not even at his own expense.

"You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes."

"Keenly distressing to the mind"

I'm not sure if when Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises the things that I found to be keenly distressing to the mind were then felt to be keenly distressing to the mind. Black people are repeatedly referred to by the N word, gay men are referred to as "faggots" and there is no end to belittling Robert Cohn because of his begin Jewish. Was this par for the course at the time the book was written? Does this merely reflect Hemingway's feelings? Or did Hemingway include these things just be provocative? None of this even touches on the passages about the running of the bulls and the bullfighting scenes.

It's been thirty years since I read anything by Hemingway. The Old Man and The Sea really should not be taught to high school students - they don't have the life experience to understand it and it may just scare them off of Hemingway forever! Did I enjoy this one any more? Well, yes and no. Honestly, I found it to be dry and, frankly, boring at times. But there is so much to think about in the book. It made for a excellent book club choice because of the story and the way it changed the way authors write. As much as I love Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and the like, thank you, thank you to Ernest Hemingway and the authors of his generation for teaching writers that sometimes less really is more.

Sunday Salon - January 2

Happy New Year!  I hope you were all able to usher in the new year in the perfect way for you.  We spent a lovely evening with friends at their home--good eats, good drinks, embarrassingly bad showing at Beatles Trivial Pursuit.

I was all done signing up for challenges for this year.  Absolutely done.  Was not going to even look at A Novel Challenge.  So, of course, you know I did.  Where I found about about the 2011 Fairy Tale Challenge, hosted by Tif of Tif Talks Books.  How in the world was I going to pass that one up?  Since I'm already reading fairy tales for my weekly Fairy Tale Fridays feature, this one should be no problem so I'm signing up for the Happily Ever After level which means I need to read 12 things.  There are several other challenges I'm keeping my eye on--I may yet have to sign up for them.  But I'll see where I'm at in a couple of weeks before I commit.

Couldn't wait for the Bloggiesta being held in three weeks; I had to do some work in my Google Reader this weekend.  I haven't been able to keep up with the number of new posts in my reader for the past couple of months and there were several blogs on my list that haven't posted anything in many months.  Hopefully I haven't deleted any of you--if I did, please shoot me a comment so I can add you back on the list!  Also, I did something I've never done before.  I gave myself a set amount of time to read posts today and when the time was up, I marked the rest as read.  Need to start the new year with a clean slate!

I got a Christmas present this week from my son and his girlfriend.  They gave me Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales with gorgeous illustrations from Arthur Rackham.  You'll be hearing much more about this book on Fairy Tale Fridays. There are tales in this book that are new to me.  Have you ever heard of one titled "Fred and Kate?"  

What's on your reading agenda for this week?

Jane Bites Back by Michael Thomas Ford & Pride & Prejudice by Marvel Comics

When I waved the white flag on challenges a couple of weeks ago, I had completely lost track of the fact that the Everything Austen Challenge also ended on December 31.  I may be willing to give up on some challenges but not on this one!  So I've immersed myself this week in racing to complete five more things for the challenge, having already read and reviewed Northanger Abbey.

Jane Bites Back by Michael Thomas Ford
Published December 2009 by Random House Publishing Group
Source: I won this book as part of the prize pack for last years' "Everything Austen Challenge"

What if Jane Austen really was dead?  Or, more precisely, what if she were undead?  In Jane Bites Back, 41-year-old Jane Austen traveled for a tryst with Lord Byron only to have him seduce her...and the turn her into a vampire.  She returned home only to fake her own illness and death.  Over 200 years later, she's living in a small town, operating a bookstore, fending off a possible suitor and just about to give up on having her last manuscript published.  Things are complicated enough but they get even more complicated when a publisher buys her book, Lord Byron returns to try to woo her away (and by "woo" I mean threaten to harm those she cares about if she doesn't come with him), and a particularly vocal Charlotte Bronte fan, who is also a well-known blogger, starts causing trouble. 

This book did pose some interesting ideas as Jane contemplated her modern day life as opposed to her known life and what it might be like to actually outlive everyone and everything you ever knew.  But seriously, this book is almost three hundred pages long and in the end almost nothing is tied up.  Byron seems to have become a changed vampire, Jane has decided to take a chance on love but there is still the matter of another vampire, Jane still hasn't told her lover the truth about herself and Byron is prepping to train her more secrets of the vampire world.  Ford appears to have written this book solely to set himself up with the means to write a sequel.

Pride and Prejudice (set of 5 comic books)
Published April 2009 by Marvel Comics
Source: more loot from the Everything Austen prize pack

Exactly what it says it is--the graphic version of my all-time favorite book.  Kudos to Marvel comics for a job well done chopping the book down to the amount of dialogue and narrative that can be squeezed into this format without losing the essence of the book.  This book took me right back to the comic versions of other classic books I read growing up and I have to admit that enjoyed them.  Except for the faces.  Really, I often found them to be more than a little creepy, hard to distinguish the different young female characters and the faces were a bit too modern. Oh, and the ads for other comics and video games were distracting and seemed entirely out of place.  If I'm reading any kind of a version of Pride & Prejudice, am I really likely to be the kind of person who will be interested in picking up the game "Red Faction: Guerilla," rated M for mature audiences?

Sex and the Austen Girl
An internet series written by Laura Viera Rigler (Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict and Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict) seen on Babelgum.com

It has been my intention since I first heard of this series to keep up with it as the new episodes came out.  And then I completely forgot about it.  So I watched all 23 (as of now) episodes in one evening.  Which means that I watched the beginning 23 times.  Boy, was I sick of that by the end.  The series consists of two characters, "Jane Mansfield" and "Courtney Stone" having a conversation about different aspects of life.  "Jane" has been dropped from Regency England into modern day Los Angeles and "Courtney" has been dropped from L.A. into Jane Austen's England.  These ladies find a lot they agree on (indoor plumbing is vastly superior to chamber pots) and some things they don't (Jane is appalled that women shave and wax off all of their body hair).  Twenty-three episodes in a row got to be a little much.  But taken individually, these are a lot of fun and make you think about the things we take for granted and things that might be better done the good old-fashioned way.

The "Madeline" Books by Ludwig Bemelmans

Madeline, Madeline's Rescue, Madeline and the Bad Hat, Madeline and the Gypsies, and Madeline in America and Other Holiday Tales by Ludwig Bemelmans

The original "Madeline" was first published in 1939
Source: All five books purchased for my daughter

"In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines."

So begins the book Madeline, the first in a series of books written first by Ludwig Bemelmans and more recently by his grandson John Bemelmans Mariano. The books are charming for their poetry, lovely drawings but most of all for the plucy little Madeline, "the smallest of all."  The girls are shepherded by Miss Clavel and enjoy great adventures throughout Paris but the biggest excitement of the book was Madeline's appendicitis attack.

Madeline's Rescue is the story of what happens when Madeline is rescued from the Seine River by a dog and won the Caldecott Medal in 1954.  In Madeline and the Bad Hat readers are introduced to Pepito, the son of the Spanish Ambassador who moves into the house next door to the girls.  Madeline and Pepito head off for great adventures in Madeline and the Gypsies.  "Madeline in America" is a collection of stories that include stories started by Bemelmans but finished by Marciano.  It also includes a lovely story about Christmas with Bemelmans written by his daughter.

I read the books as part of the "You've Got Mail" Challenge.  In that movie, Meg Ryan played a character that owned a children's book store.  All of the books/authors for the challenge were shown or mentioned in the movie.  It was a pleasure to revisit "Madeline;" I just may have to rewatch the movie, starring Frances McDormand as well!

James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl

James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
119 pages
Copyright 1961 by Alfred A. Knopf
Source: Christmas gift 1969 from my aunt

Poor James was leading a perfectly fine life until one day his parents went to London where they were eaten by a rhinoceros who had escaped from the zoo. From then on he is sent to live in the middle of nowhere with his Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge--two exceedingly nasty spinsters who treat James as if he were their slave and don't allow him to leave their hill. Then one day a strange man approaches James at the fence with a bag full of mystery green things and tell him to eat them and they will make his life better. As James' luck would have it, he falls as he goes back up the hill, dropped the bag, and watching sadly as all of the green things disappear into the earth. All is not lost, however. Those little green creatures work their magic on an old peach tree that hasn't produced fruit in years. Soon there begins to grow a single peach that grows and grows until it is so enormous that the aunts are selling opportunities to see it. After the crowds leave, as James is being forced to clean up the mess the crowds have left, he discovers a hole in the peach and follows the tunnel that it is the opening to, only to discover a room in the center, filled with an assortment of insects and bugs that are now as big as he is, thanks to the same magic that grew the peach. One of them, the centipede, goes to work on chewing the peach loose from the tree and soon the group finds themselves bouncing down the hill, landing in the ocean and beginning a great adventure.

Only Roald Dahl can write a book where, in the second paragraph no less, he kills off both parents by having them eaten by a rhinoceros and still call it a children's book! All of his books feature some sort of horrible thing happening to the hero or heroine, all of them include some threat of danger and all of them include some kind of fantastical, magical thing. If they were written today, people would probably rail against them for being too violent for children. Fortunately, they were written years ago, when they could teach the lesson that even the smallest of us can survive and flourish despite the most terrible of odds. On re-reading this book, I'm convinced that Lemony Snicket, of A Series of Unfortunate Events, was heavily influenced by Dahl. I'm sure he wasn't the only one.

The book is also filled with wonderful poems and plenty to keep even an adult entertained. If you have young children, I recommend you read this one with them! I re-read this one as part of a couple of challenges and I found myself reading great passages of it to my 18-year-old who was equally amused.

Last Challenge--At Least That's What I'm Promising Myself!

I know I said I was done adding challenges. But, darn it, some of them are just so tempting! Like this one, hosted by Trish of Hey Lady! Whatcha Reading?, which challenges the reader to read books by Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck. Since I was already reading Atwood's "A Handmaid's Tale" and Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" for other challenges, I figured this one was easy. Maybe too easy. So to actually make it a challenge, and because the whole challenge is centered around Oates, I'm adding Oates' "We Were The Mulvaneys." You'll notice I was not crazy enough to throw any Tolstoy in there!

Sunday Salon - December 6

It's snowing here this evening with a big snowfall predicted for Tuesday. Looks like the kinds of days coming up that will mean curling up with books and hot tea. For tonight it meant going over my bookshelf inventory and seeing what's on the shelves that I can use for the challenges I've already committed to for the coming year. Thanks to my hubby for being such a pack rat--he minored in English so we have a lot of novels sitting on the shelves left from those classes that are going to be a big help!
For the Gilmore Girls Reading Challenge, I think I would be a very bad host if I didn't aim for the top level so 20 books it will be. Here's what I've settled on so far:

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
Sonnets From The Portuguese by Elizabeth Barret Browning
Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
Daisy Miller by Henry James
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
I'd like to pick up a couple of the non-fiction books to fill out the list.

For this challenge, I have to pick out titles with the following words in the title:
Food - Five Quarters of An Orange by Joanne Harris
Body of Water - Heather Graham
Title - Secret Lives of the First Ladies by Cormac O'Brien
Plant - In The Woods by Tana French
Place Name - Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Music Term - Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

For this one I needed to pick three to six books or movies written about, by or based on the Brontes. I'm hoping to watch a couple of movies which I've yet to decide on. My books, as of now, are:

Villette by Charlotte Bronte
Agnes Gray by Anne Bronte
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
I'm going to re-read Chesapeake to start this challenge. After that, I'm not sure which one I'll read next--so many to choose from!

Sunday Salon - November 29

I hope that all of you in the U.S. had a lovely Thanksgiving weekend. We were lucky enough to get to spend it with almost all of our immediate family and enjoyed entirely too much food, plenty of football, and even braved the crowds on Black Friday, contributing our bit to turning the economy around.
I was very excited this evening to open the blog and find that I now have 100 followers. I've been promising a giveaway for sometime and this certainly seems like the time to have one so look for that announcement coming up this week.

On Tuesday, I'll also be announcing a challenge I'll be hosting beginning the first of the year. It seems that there are quite a few "Gilmore Girl" fans out there and this one will focus on the books that were either mentioned or that appeared on that show. I've got Miss H working on a button for me and my resident computer expert looking at options for how, exactly, it will be set up. Now I'm just hoping that you all haven't already signed up for more challenges than you can handle!

National Book Awards Challenge

Okay, I know I said I wasn't going to join any more challenges. Heck, I'm hardly making a dent in two of the challenges I joined already. But this one is the National Book Award Challenge and these are really, really good books which I should read. And you only have to read one book by the end of the year to win a bronze medal. I haven't earned a medal in anything in years and years. So I signed up. One of the books on this list is Julia Glass' "Three Junes" which I happen to already own. Anytime I can be forced into chiseling into Mount TBR, it's a good thing.

Sound intriguing? To find a list of the books eligible for this challenge or to sign up, click on this link above. Thanks to Rachel at A Bohemian's Book Reviews and Amanda at Life and Times of a "New" New Yorker for sponsoring this challenge!