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.

I've only read Old Man and the Sea, but I found him to be quite compelling, and I liked his style, despite how easy it is to poke fun.

For those of you who haven't been following critical Hemingway studies over the last ten years, much of it has been filtered through the lens of his posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden.

Which is a book that Hemingway was afraid to have come out during his lifetime because it was too revealing and contains a lot of fluid gender play and role-playing.

The upshot of which is that that the machismo in Hemingway's work is seen much more as a kind of gender-performance, a kind of male drag, if you will.

The Garden of Eden isn't his best work (though I do like it a lot), but it has recast his earlier work in a different light.

As for his writing style, it was famously influential (particularly to journalists) and has been endlessly parodied. I think style is the most personal aspect of writing (whereas many people oddly seem to think of it as curlicues and icing on the cake), so it's hard for me to criticize a writer based on their style if the writing is good. It may not be to my taste, but there's nothing wrong with the way Hemingway wrote. It's an entirely defensible, lean, muscular (ooh! Macho!) prose style. If you don't like it, that's fine, but that's not really a flaw in Hemingway's work. It's a matter of taste.

erika, I really enjoyed The Sun Also Rises after loathing every short story and Farewell to Arms.

It's not his style I take issue with, though I'm certainly not a fan. It's his fucking characters who all make me want to kill them. And the entire blank flatness of his women. Do not like.

Oh, but like more than Mark Twain, to give you a bar to understand how little I enjoy Twain.

Kat is me except for disliking Twain, which is just crazy talk.