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THE SUN ALSO RISES – Ernest Hemingway

Posted by Daniel on December 30, 2021

Posted in: OTHER, Uncategorized. Tagged: 4 stars, Book Reviews, Books, Classic, Reviews. Leave a comment

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“The Lost Generation.” Following World War I a group of friends try to find some meaning in their lives as they hang out and party and drink in Europe.

I read and reviewed this book a little over five years ago, and I’ll use a lot of that review here because my thoughts about this book haven’t changed. This was one of the first books I read in college that made me realize that the ‘classics’ weren’t all dull because they sure seemed that way before I read this.

In 2016 I had this to say:

Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is a novel of the ‘Lost Generation’ — a generation that came of age during World War I. it is the story of a group of friends, British and American, who seem to have very few cares in the world other than one another. The men look to be as masculine as they can be, and the women flirtatious and non-committal.

The main character, Jake Barnes, struggles with the loss of his manhood during the war, but harbors a passion for Lady Brett Ashley. Brett hasn’t been patient and has had an affair with one of Barnes’ friends … a Jew (as Hemingway constantly reminds us) … Robert Cohn. This has created tension among the group of friends, with Cohn constantly hanging just on the periphery of the friendship circle.

It was good to read this book again. I last read it maybe thirty-plus years ago while in college. I enjoyed it then, also enjoying the teacher’s shared insight into the book. Now, it was a pleasant reminder as to why I liked it so much, but it also struck some new chords, in this man in his fifties. (Now 60.)

In this reading I was really struck by Hemingway’s minimalist style. I highlighted a number of passages this time, moments that work for Hemingway, but if I were to read them from any other writer, I’d assume the writer needed a better editor. For instance:

“The man who sold tackle was out, and we had to wait for him to come back. Finally he came in, and we bought a pretty good rod cheap, and two landing-nets.”

Why did we need to know the man was out and they had to wait for him? Nothing happened during that wait that was worth writing about. You write something like that in a college creative writing class and the teacher will draw a red line through that first sentence.

This is the third time I’ve read this book (and I generally don’t re-read books) and I definitely picked up more on the relationships and I rode more of an emotional rollercoaster toward Brett and Jake this time around.

Looking for a good book? If you haven’t read Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, correct that right now. If you have read this book, then it’s time to read it again.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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The Sun Also Rises

author: Ernest Hemingway

publisher: Penguin Classics

ISBN: 9780143136866

hardcover, 256 pages

AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS – Jules Verne

Posted by Daniel on October 25, 2021

Posted in: SF/FANTASY. Tagged: 3 Stars, Adventure, Book Reviews, Books, Classic, Literature, Reviews, SF/Fantasy. Leave a comment

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A British dandy, Phileas Fogg, makes a bet with other British dandies that he can travel around the world in eighty days. Thanks to his financial situation, he is able to pay extravagantly and be afforded preferential treatment when standard means of travel don’t pan out. Fogg makes the journey with his newly acquired valet, Passepartout.

As you might guess from my brief description, I’m not the biggest fan of this book.

I’ve read a fair amount of Jules Verne, including Paris in the Twentieth Century when it was first released, but I’d never had any interest in reading Around the World in Eighty Days. But as I’ve recently had a desire to catch up on reading more of the classics that I’ve missed out on, and I saw that Penguin had this available as an ARC request, I thought I’d finally read this.

What struck me the most is how much Phileas Fogg is very much the definition of ‘white privilege.’ The whole trip around the world is based on a wager Fogg makes with some of his friends as they sit around in the club and note a recent newspaper article that states it should theoretically be possible to go around the world in eighty days if all means of transportation around on time and on schedule. The other gentlemen in the club take Fogg’s bet and off he goes, taking with him his very newly acquired manservant.

Of course things are not running on time, creating one of the conflicts in the book … how will Fogg get out of this timing jam?

With money, of course.

Fogg has a confident – almost but not quite cocky – attitude that things will work out. And of course they do, though his money helps, as does his servant. I think it’s pretty clear, however, that if Fogg were not a man of some financial means, this trip would never have succeeded.

A second conflict arises when it is learned that there was a bank robbery in London shortly before Fogg takes off on his globe-trotting adventure and at least one man, detective inspector Fix, believes Fogg may have been the robber – why else would he be traveling with a large amount of cash and be in such a hurry to get on to his next port of call?

I did like this storyline, but it really wasn’t developed enough to make it very sustaining.

There are a lot of different locations in this 252 page book and the episodic nature of the story takes away from the development of a really engaging story. Each location brought a challenge that was overcome and then on to the next. I can definitely see how an audience in 1872 (or even decades later) would marvel at some of these locales, and looking at it 150 years later it is impressive how accurate much of it is.

Somehow, with all the locations and with Fix hot on their tail, Fogg finds time for romance on the journey. This never rang true for me, but again, I can see how an early audience would have cheered at this.

My favorite portions of the book were the snow-sailing across America and the near-miss at arriving at the club in time and the explanation as to why it was closer than Fogg anticipated. This was probably the most anxious I felt in the book.

I’m glad to have finally read this, but there are so many other Verne books I would recommend before this one.

Looking for a good book? Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days is a classic that should be read, but it’s not his most exciting or even adventurous novel.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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Around the World in Eighty Days

author: Jules Verne

series: The Extraordinary Voyages #11

publisher: Penguin Books

ISBN: 9780241468654

hardcover, 288 pages

THE DOVER READER: EDGAR ALLAN POE

Posted by Daniel on March 31, 2021

Posted in: SHORT FICTION. Tagged: 4 stars, Classic, Short Stories. Leave a comment

I last remember reading Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction back in middle school, and his poetry when I was in college so I thought it was well past time to dig into some of his work again. And what a treat to do so!

Publisher Dover, who repeatedly does a very good job publishing no-frills ‘thrift’ editions of classic works, has done a fine job here, giving us a lot of Poe. And let’s be honest here, a little Poe goes a long way, so a lot of Poe needs to be read over lengthy periods of time.

What I found is that Poe’s short stories still show why he’s a master story-teller and why students still read his works in school. There’s a lot of power and suspense in his short works. Stories like “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” (the first story I ever remember reading by Poe) still hold up well against modern fiction, though some of the formality of the language does seem archaic at times.

I’m not a person inclined to read poetry much but one of my favorite poems has been Poe’s The Raven. Once again, I was reminded why I like this so much as I read through it. Poe combines the power of the rhythm with an almost supernatural, dark story and it really sucks you in. I also enjoyed “The Bells” – a poem I’d not known about. Poe definitely caught the sense of ringing bells in this work. The rest of the poetry for me was, “eh.”

The one longer work included here was The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (sometimes referred to as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket). I think this was my first encounter with the book and I was not impressed. It felt unnecessarily drawn out and I was interminably bored through 90% of the book.

But the gem here for me was some of Poe’s non-fiction.

“Maelzel’s Chess Player” is an article Poe wrote, exposing the fraud behind an automaton chess player known as ‘The Turk’ which was touring Europe and America in the mid-1820’s. It’s a really interesting read and you don’t have to know ‘The Turk’ as Poe’s article describes it quite thoroughly.

And finally we get The Philosophy of Composition” in which Poe writes about how good writers write when they write well. (Thanks, Wikipedia.) Examining his own work, Poe chooses his poem “The Raven” – which I’ve already mentioned as one of my favorite poems. Getting insight on how he wrote this iconic work is quite interesting. I’m a little disappointed that my college professor who introduced me to the poem didn’t share this article as well (we didn’t have the internet when I was a college student, friends).

I had now gone so far as the conception of a Raven—the bird of ill omen—monotonously repeating the one word, “Nevermore,” at the conclusion of each stanza, in a poem of melancholy tone, and in length about one hundred lines. Now, never losing sight of the object supremeness, or perfection, at all points, I asked myself—“Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death—was the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?” From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious—“When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world—and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”

I had now to combine the two ideas, of a lover lamenting his deceased mistress and a Raven continuously repeating the word “Nevermore.”—I had to combine these, bearing in mind my design of varying, at every turn, the application of the word repeated; but the only intelligible mode of such combination is that of imagining the Raven employing the word in answer to the queries of the lover.

Fascinating.

This book contains the following:

FICTION

MS. Found in a Bottle

King Pest

Ligeia

The Fall of the House of Usher

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

The Masque of the Red Death

The Mystery of Marie Rogêt

The Pit and the Pendulum

The Black Cat

The Gold-Bug

The Tell-Tale Heart

The Oblong Box

The Purloined Letter

The Imp of the Perverse

Some Words with a Mummy

The Cask of Amontillado

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

POETRY

A Dream

Dreams

A Dream within a Dream

Evening Star

“The Happiest Day, the Happiest Hour”

The Lake: To ____

Spirits of the Dead

Stanzas

To ____ (“I saw thee on thy bridal day—”)

Fairy-Land

Romance

Sonnet—To Science

To ____ (“The bowers whereat, in dreams, I see”)

To ____ (“I heed not that my earthly lot”)

To the River ____

To Helen

The City in the Sea

Israfel

Lenore

The Sleeper

The Valley of Unrest

The Coliseum

To One in Paradise

To F ____

Sonnet—To Zante

The Haunted Palace

Sonnet—Silence

The Conqueror Worm

Dream-Land

Eulalie—A Song

The Raven

To M. L. S. ____

Ulalume

To ____ (“Not long ago, the writer of these lines”)

To Helen

Annabel Lee

The Bells

Eldorado

For Annie

To My Mother

Alone

Alphabetical List of Titles

Alphabetical List of First Lines

NONFICTION

Maelzel’s Chess-Player

A Few Words on Secret Writing

The Philosophy of Composition

Looking for a good book? If you haven’t read Edgar Allan Poe in a long time (or not at all), then you really should pick up The Dover Reader: Edgar Allan Poe. There is a reason his works are still published – they are good.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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Edgar Allan Poe: The Dover Reader

author: Edgar Allan Poe

publisher: Dover Publications

ISBN: 048679119X

paperback, 544 pages

A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR – Daniel Defoe

Posted by Daniel on December 30, 2020

Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: 4 stars, Book Reviews, Books, Classic, Literature, Reviews. Leave a comment

Like thousands of other readers, I thought that this seemed an appropriate year (2020) to read Daniel Defoe’s classic, A Journal of the Plague Year.

This is an unusual book as it’s part fiction, part historical reflection. In today’s parlance we might call this “historical fiction” but many scholars today still can’t agree on how to classify this book.

It is 1665 and we follow one man, “H.F.,” as he explores the devastating bubonic plague, also know as the Black Death, and its effects on families and communities throughout London.

Defoe does a remarkable job at making this personal and bringing the reader right to the door of plague victims and neighbors of victims – those living in fear of catching the plague. We meet a wide arrange of people, giving us a snapshot of all the different fears and reactions during this dark experience.

Defoe wrote the book in 1722, likely based on actual journal accounts, such as that of Samuel Pepys, but his narrative makes this easier to read than true journals.

There is a little bit of humor here (or at least I found a couple of the encounters a little humorous), but overall this is a bleak story – as one would expect.

What really struck me were the counts. The local parishes post the weekly burials:

The weekly bill, which makes out this decrease of the burials in the west and north side of the city, stands thus—

From the 12th of September to the 19th—

– St Giles, Cripplegate 456

– St Giles-in-the-Fields 140

– Clarkenwell 77

– St Sepulcher 214

– St Leonard, Shoreditch 183

– Stepney parish 71

– Aldgate 623

– Whitechappel 532

– In the ninety-seven parishes within the walls 1493

– In the eight parishes on Southwark side 1636

– ——

– Total 6060

What strikes me, aside from the numbers, is the fact that today I check the daily reports of the number of people infected with the COVID-19 corona virus as well as the number of people who’ve died, daily, from the virus.

Readers will also note other similarities to today’s pandemic reactions. From those who don’t take it seriously, those who take advantage of the situation, those who are overwhelmed with fear, and those overwhelmed with grief. Essentially … humans haven’t changed much in 300 years.

The narrative style is just a little difficult to read (as many works of literature, 300 years old, are difficult, I find), but the story definitely resonates given our current pandemic.

Looking for a good book? A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe reminds us that humans haven’t changed much over the course of centuries, and that nature, by way of plagues and viruses, is relentless and unforgiving.