E. Hemingway

>>9821546

The Sun Also Rises is honestly his best novel. the short story Snows of Kilimanjaro is also excellent.

He's a better short story writer than novelist. My favourite is probably Farewell to Arms.

>>9821546
A lot of authors have specific styles and thematic that would only appeal to certain types of people.
If you are not obsessed with masculinity maybe Hemingway is just not your type.
Don't expect from a book to "hit you". To appreciate a book try to understand what it tries to express, how it expresses it and how that makes it different from other books.
Art doesn't have to be specifically designed to appeal to you. Approaching a book with the mindset that it has to please you personally is not literary.

Read his short stories instead. But I personal like for whom the bells tolls

I started "A Farewell to Arms" and really didn't like it. Yes, it exposes the monotony of war and what not, but that doesn't mean that every character has to be boring and every occurrence must be mundane.

On the other hand, "For Whom the Bell Tolls" was much better. I found an anniversary edition and read through it in about two weeks. It still is Hemingway, so there's a lot of tedium. Also, it is written in a very odd way, as if it was a direct translation from Spanish, but since most of the dialogue is in Spanish, I guess it adds to the atmosphere.

>>9821555
A Farewell to Arms was my first Hemmingway, how clinical he describes such horrific things put me off at first but I'd probably say it's his best too.

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Island in the Stream

>>9821546
Is his stuff supposed to be full of ridiculous masculinity?

>>9821570

I couldn't tolerate the Bells. It's still his only novel I haven't finished. Some things that bothered me were the mundane descriptions of dusty hills (Farewell to Arms gives your imagination something at least), everybody having the vocabulary of a toddler (and a shared one, calling the girl 'deer', each other 'good one' etc), protagonist always being referred to by his full name, love story confirmed by every character in like two pages etc.

>>9821564
That's a meaningful comment, thanks.

By "hitting" I meant that the book needs to be at least engaging in order to enjoy it. Although I understand that the art works differently for different people.

>>9821597
It's precisely this understated style that is considered the appeal of Hemingway's work.
Imagine you are a tough guy with tough manly sensitive emotions but you don't express them because emotions are for girly pussies and you are tough manly man so you are just indifferent to everything instead. What you identify as a boring space-filler in fact expresses this sort of emotion. If you really insist on not missing out then try to get into this mindset.