One of my reading goals for 2010 was to read a few classics, so to that end I am halfway through Hemingway's 1920's The Sun Also Rises. I am a little more than halfway through, and I wanted to post my preliminary impressions, which certainly may change as I finish the book.
To be honest, sacrilege though it may be, I am having a bit of an Emperor's New Clothes moment with this book. I will grant that it is evocative of a very different time and place; Paris and Spain in the expatriate days of the post-WW1 era. Beyond that...I don't know. From a plot standpoint, nothing much has happened, the characters are pretty much two-dimensional and unsympathetic, the dialogue is painful at times (beyond the vocabulary and idiom differences of a bygone time), and I don't see any real significant theme development pulling things together. I can't help thinking that if what I had read so far were presented to a creative writing teacher in its current state, the teacher might well ask/tell the student "where is this all going, and you have some style issues that probably need working on..."
Onward we go.
15mm Napoleonic French Dragoons
26 minutes ago
You know I know how you feel. Last year I had the idea to read through some of the classics and was left rather sad by some of the classics I chose as well.
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