Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.
Alberto Manguel (via wordsnquotes)
Tag: books
CLASSIC OF THE DAY: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
This, friends, was the single book that so fatefully launched Ernest Hemingway’s amazing and long-lived literary career. As such, it is as close to being a legendary book as they come, yet some seventy five years after its initial publication, it still offers a story that is also surprisingly fresh, personal, and memorable. For all of his obvious excesses, Hemingway was an artist compelled to delve deliberately into painful truths, and he attempted to do so with a style of writing that cut away all of the frills and artifice, so that at its heart, this novel is meant as an exploration into what it means to be adult and alive. Thus we are introduced to Jake Barnes, a veteran of WWI, now forced by his wounds to live as a man without the ability to act like one, forced by impotence to forgo all of life’s usual intimacies, and all of its associated life connections for which he so yearns. At the same time, Jake attempts to live a life of meaning and purpose, one crammed full with activity, work, and friendships.
Enter his true love, the feckless Lady Ashley, and indeed the plot thickens, for we soon see how Jake’s physical affliction has painfully affected several others. Ashley loves him, but needs a virile man who can give her the physical love she needs. While Ashley is a woman of uncommon beauty, she is also virtuous enough in her one way to want the one man she truly loves to be her lover. Like all of us, she wants most that which she can never have, and so she returns to the source of her own dilemma time after time to Jake, her emotional match, the one man who cannot give her the mature emotional love she craves. So they are condemned to circle around each other…What we are left with is a modern tragedy, one in which the characters must somehow resolve the irresolvable.
…One reads Hemingway quickly, at least at first, when one learns to slow down and drink in every word and every detail as it is related. For me and for millions of others, the true genius of Hemingway is to be found in his artful use of language. This book was Hemingway’s first truly successful foray into the world of letters, and the result changed the face of modern fiction.
by guest reviewer, Barron L.
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Teacher: Reading a book is better than sex.
[Class titters]
Teacher: It’s like a 10-hour orgasm!
[Laughter increases]
Girl pipes up: Yeah, and with a book I actually get to finish!
[Boys’ laughter dies off almost instantly as the girls hoot]OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH
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