Now that I'm older, I can appreciate Hemingway, like I can appreciate that some people like bleu cheese the way I like brie, but I can't stand the taste of it. Which is miles better than my stance on Hemingway when I was younger, which was basically STAB STAB STAB.

Like JZ, I generally groove on the baroque, but I can appreciate terse and laconic (some Duras, e.g.) but generally, I want plot AND characterization AND language.

Tolkien: when I was younger, I read every single word (including the Simarillion and footnotes) but this was also in my "read every encyclopedia of mythology like it's a novel" phase. I skimmed more when I re-read when the movies came out.

I'd rather read Woolf's biographies and diaries than her works, again. Isn't that sad? Not that her work isn't fine, but I find I'm more fascinated with how her life, time and culture affected her work. But I had a Woolf-ite prof so I read a TON of Woolf, and I just don't feel compelled to re-read Mrs. Dalloway or To The Lighthouse for pleasure.

I DO love to watch movies based on her work, though. I think it's really interesting to see what directors and actors do with it.

I can't think of Hemingway without thinking of...

Romantic? Hemingway? He was an abusive, alcoholic misogynist who squandered half of his life hanging around Picasso trying to nail his leftovers. /10 Things I Hate About You

I can't imagine Pete not liking From the Dust Returned Jilli. It's so you that I think appreciating the one would have to translate to appreciating the other.

Awww, thank you, that means a lot to me.

My worry is that I still don't have a good notion of how florid of language Pete prefers to read, so I have no idea if the lushness of Bradbury's prose would set his teeth on edge.

In random news, I'm just reading American Gods for the first time, and why did it never occur to me that Wotan = Woden = Odin??

I've never read any Vonnegut, ever. I don't know how I missed him, but I did.Should I read him now, or is he one of those authors you find and love at sixteen, if you're going to? I intend to read "A Moveable Feast" sometime.

I think you could love Vonnegut at any age. Try Slaughterhouse-Five. There are no happy endings, but I can't imagine that putting you off. He can be quite funny, though.

My wife loves him, at least slaughterhouse and she is certainly not 16. She did read him for the first time then, though, in a high school class. Despite my dislike, I must admit that her high school books were way cooler than mine.

My high school reading was pretty pedestrian -- Tess, some Shakespeare, Heart of Darkness, etc. -- but junior year I got to write a research paper on On the Road, and senior year we read The Color Purple.

It's amazing how little else I remember, though.

Yeah, the happy ending thing? Not so much of an issue since Wire fandom. where the motto in general is that "Happy endings are for massage parlors,"(Although if you squint, there are one or two.) I think that I was too young for Jake Barnes and them when I read it. Not cognitively, maybe, but spiritually, for sure.(And I have to wonder what thousands of hours of television, albeit fewer thousands than the "average", whoever that is, did to my experience of a such a work.) And it's a rare book that you can grok on a hearts-and-minds level while still looking for water images or whatever to write your essays on. Maybe I should try again with the Sun Also Rises? Not the Old Man And The Sea...kinda enjoy hating that one...for a dialogue fiend like me, so much silence was reading hell. I enjoyed the Rings trilogy, but I also skipped around like mad to get to exciting bits.(About every third or fourth page.)

I rather like Hemingway, though, despite the hypermasculinity. He can tell a story, and his sentences don't go on for pages.

I've always liked him, too. (Although I've only read his Nick Adams short stories and The Sun Also Rises.) I think Hemingway was really screwed-up and sad, and since I believe the machismo comes out of that, I just end up pitying the guy and not feeling angry. Also, he was a really good writer--"In Another Country" is one of my favorite stories.