Yeah. I'm really not fond of Hemingway. He does interesting things with style, to be sure, but I just.........ugh.

I like pretty language--I don't think that's a secret. Concise can be excellent too, of course; take, for example, Lois McMaster Bujold's writing. But Hemingway takes it too far in the other direction. He wants you to think that he's doing something New and Important by writing in an extremely simple style, but really it's just choppy and gets him out of making any kind of coherent whole whatsoever. Or so it has always seemed to me.

"Indian Camp" was the first story. Kid goes with dad to Indian settlement. Dad is amazed by how he managed to do a C-section in such poor conditions. (Me: You just did a C-section. Without anaesthetic. And you're amazed at the technical aspects...? And the father's helper, also the kid's uncle, gets bitten by the woman as they start to cut. And again i say...) This is apparently supposed to be some sort of great story about leraning to be an adult and stuff, or maybe it's just about how much less women are worth than men, but anyway I found it extremely irritating.

Irritating, actually, is how I'd describe all of Hemingway's works that I have read so far. I've heard various people praise his dialogue up and down, but to me it seems very plain and lifeless. Dialogue should sound natural, true, but you're writing literature here bud--real life is frankly pretty boring; you can write that boringness, I don't care, but what's true to life does not always live on the page, and Hemingway's dialogue never does for me.

The next two stories concern the kid as he gets older, breaks up with his girlfriend, hangs out with his best friend in a drunken depression, and decides that even though he broke it off with this girlfriend (whom he was going to marry) rather suddenly, it's okay if he just goes back and tries to start it up again.

I'm sorry, these make me angry. I suppose that's a sign that he's at least somewhat effective--I would be apathetic if they weren't compelling in some way. And there are moments of really cool stuff--describing how one sets up fishing lines to work at night, frex. But overall, they just irritate me, because the good parts are totally going to waste in a mire of misogyny and faux elevation of fishing and alcohol.

Joyce was a lot better--more in a couple of hours, after class which is about to start.