“Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?”
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Title: The Sun Also Rises
Author: Ernest Hemingway
Genres: Classics, Literary
Pages: 256 (Kindle)
Published: October 22nd, 1926
My Rating: ★★★
Read: 5/26/2022 – 5/28/2022
Review:
This is a book I’ve been meaning to read since high school. I think at one point I actually did start it but didn’t get through the first chapter. Now as an adult, I still found myself quite bored throughout most of the story. I found the history of the book mentioned in the foreword more interesting.
My disinterest was more of a plot/character problem. I simply wasn’t interested in the subject matter. Another problem was the years of build up and having it fall short. Perhaps this is an unpopular opinion, but I found the storytelling dull. As a piece of historical literature, it’s interesting, but definitely not a book I would have read otherwise.
Afterthoughts:
My interest in this book stems from the Cheers episode ‘I’ll Gladly Pay You Tuesday’ where a signed first edition of the book is the focus of the episode. Otherwise, my attention has never been too drawn to Hemingway. As I said in my review, I was underwhelmed. I wanted to finish it though to complete a Bingo square in Book Santas & Lovers‘ 2022 Bingo challenge (Read a book read by someone in a book, movie, or TV show).
A side note about the page count: The version I read is marked at 98 pages but it’s definitely longer than that. I actually switched to the audiobook halfway through because I wanted to get through it faster. That runs about 8 hours.