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

I'm glad the fashion in writing is moving away from "Hemingway is the way you should be writing." For a while much of the advice I read held up Hemingway as an ideal.

Like Pix & Kat, I hate Hemingway, but like The Sun Also Rises. I am kind of indifferent to Twain. I do like the musical Big RIver!

I've tried to read Innocents Abroad, but I couldn't get past the snide. That may be Twain being sarcastic about Americans being snide abroad, but I already knew that Americans can be stupid about other cultures. I don't need to have a potentially interesting traveloge of mid-19th century Europe messed up with irony.

I thought it was funny, but I like him, so it's easier to be patient. Because to a modern person, it's not all hilarious. Connie, people do say that he revolutionized novels by making dialogue more natural and whatnot. I mean, I don't suppose there'd be Raymond Carver without Hemingway, although the drinking and masculinity tends to bite those guys in the butt, rather than get glamourous.

For a while much of the advice I read held up Hemingway as an ideal.

I think some of his techniques were effective, but no one wants a whole generation of writers imitating one particular voice or style. Dialogue *is* more realistic when it's natural, for instance.

Dialogue *is* more realistic when it's natural, for instance.

I really love Madeleine L'Engle's books (for adults and kids/teens), but no one in the history of EVER talks like her dialogue.

Okay, I am only 1/4 of the way into this, but Elizabeth Wein's Code Name Verity is fantastic. It's set up as the written report of a British SOE spy, a woman, who is captured by the Nazis and forced to tell them everything she knows. Except I suspect she's playing a very dangerous game on them.

But it's already kind of awesome, especially if you like stories about women in the war effort.

Here is the deal we made. I’m putting it down to keep it straight in my own mind. “Let’s try this,” the Hauptsturmführer said to me. “How could you be bribed?” And I said I wanted my clothes back.

It seems petty, now. I am sure he was expecting my answer to be something defiant—“Give me Freedom” or “Victory”—or something generous, like “Stop toying with that wretched French Resistance laddie and give him a dignified and merciful death.” Or at least something more directly connected to my present circumstance, like “Please let me go to sleep” or “Feed me” or “Get rid of this sodding iron rail you have kept tied against my spine for the past three days.” But I was prepared to go sleepless and starving and upright for a good while yet if only I didn’t have to do it in my underwear—rather foul and damp at times, and SO EMBARRASSING. The warmth and dignity of my flannel skirt and woolly sweater are worth far more to me now than patriotism or integrity.

I have to start reading that. Book club is ... next week. Yikes.

Amy, once you start it, you can't put it down. I finished it in about four hours, reading fast. Well, maybe five.

It's really really excellent and that's all I can tell you, because it's really not a book you want to know too much about before you read it.