Some books I should reread before I die

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.

I first read this book in a high school English class in 1997. The class was an honors one. I remember sitting on the far right wall, trying to feign an indifference to school that was and still is unclear to me. I was already in an honors English course. You've already kind of jumped onto that express train, so why not just commit the full way?

Everybody has an opinion about Hemingway.

He drank too much.

He's a misogynist.

The man knows nothing about war. He spent the whole war time at a bar.

A note on the title: a reference to Ecclesiastes, one of the greatest books in the history of literature in its own right.

Hemingway wrote really short sentences. He cut through the pretty dross to get down to the basics, all clean edges and sharp lines. When he didn't, you end up with pretty little things like A Farewell to Arms that don't land in quite the same was as The Sun Also Rises, rainy days be damned.

Most days I wore a hat to class, and I would turn it in varying directions depending on my mood. The class wasn't entirely full. A bunch of kids had dropped out by then, moved into calculus and dropped the unworthy humanities. Then again, maybe they didn't allow hats by that time in my high school. Maybe I was sitting in the second row, in the second seat.

To appreciate Hemingway is to appreciate the beauty of a rock worn smooth by the passing water. I don't think it came naturally, that sort of style. It was honed by rough edges. He said that when he wrote The Sun Also Rises it was because of some guys he heard about during the war. Guys who couldn't return to the lives they had lead before in a tangible way. Imagine a love like that. It's so sad it's perfect.

Honestly though, I promise you that I was sitting somewhere in that classroom when I first read The Sun Also Rises, and I didn't even get the play on words. It just sounded like a tough type of guy trying to feel. I remember our teacher telling us a story about a commune that she lived in just after college. She told us that she was a stunner back then. We listened, rapt in the way of teenagers listening to secrets as if we were still children.

T: A good looking guy moved in. That was the end of all the that. We were all at each other's throats. He slept with almost everyone.

In The Sun Also Rises Hemingway has the perfect meat to hang on the clean bone of his prose. These are recognizable people, overwhelmed by desires that they know will go unfilled they pursue them nonetheless. I suppose Sophocles captured it when we were first getting around to this art business, "There is much that is strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness."

That was the first year that I ever asked a girl to a dance. Years before I'd always waited to be asked. In high school honors classes you hover over books like anorexic carrion crows, nibbling hesitantly, at the feast of words on the road below. And when we approach, we pull up at the last instant, afraid of the pavement and something deeper. Ennui was just a vocabulary word.

You should read The Sun Also Rises because it is the best book written by one of the best writers of the 20th century. You should read it as a counterpoint to the playful language of Joyce, and an alternative to the waves of Woolf. You should read it because it is about simple things like love and heartbreak and drinking and bull fights. It is about the things we do to pass the time between waves of sadness, the little buoys we construct, or the lighthouses in the distance.

In truth, I did sit on the wall in the third row. And I may or may not have worn a hat. It is not really important either way, whether Grant got a better score on the first exam. Those sorts of things fade in time, like the words in all the books I've ever read. What's important is that when I first read Hemingway, at 17, he didn't strike me as special. Later, after many other things had happened, which I won't go into too much detail about here, I wanted to sit down and have a beer with him, catch him while he was lucid, and talk about those months in southern Spain, even if they were only a figment of his imagination.

Years later, when I sat with one of my college professors he said, "Every writer has about one good book in them and then they just keeping writing that same book over and over again or they do something that isn't as good. What's that book by Hemingway?"

M: The Sun Also Rises.

P: Yes. That one! Everything else is just different iterations on the same thing. That is his best.