Coffee Book of the Week

This weeks book is a classic that I picked up because I had enjoyed his other books that I had read and this one may be my second favorite of his to this point. Again I had not heard much about the book I just got it because it was written by Ernest Hemingway.

 

The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

 

This book was first published in 1926 and was second novel but the first major success for him. The central idea of this book was really a narrative about the "Lost Generation". The young veterans of WWI that had trouble returning to the norm after the war was over traveling abroad to get away from the responsibilities back home. 

 

The story follows Jake Barnes, an injured fighter pilot, who can't get over being shot down in the war so he travels around Europe with his buddies Mike, Bill and Robert. He is in love with a woman, Lady Brett Ashley, who is taking the independence given to women during the war to a whole new level. All of the men in the novel are after Brett in one way or another. At the beginning of the novel she is engaged to Mike, but at one point in the novel you find out Brett once had a short affair with Robert, who spends the entire novel trying to win her back. They travel from Paris to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls. They all drink too much and party too hard with no apparent consequences other than maybe the occasional fight or an indiscretion that later merits an apology. Hemingway's description of the running of the bulls and later the bull fights themselves is graphic and the prose he uses really makes you feel like you are sitting around the drinking table with this crew or sitting in the stands with them.

Rating: 8 out of 10