Bad first impressions - Don't judge a writer by one crappy book
MONTREAL (CUP) -- I recently discovered that Ernest Hemingway is one of my favourite writers. I had been unsure; I liked Garden of Eden, but I hated Old Man and the Sea. I read A Farewell to Arms to break the tie. The beauty of his words and the way they fit together is as strangely captivating as watching a tree that's about to break in the wind.
Here's an excerpt from A Farewell to Arms that I particularly enjoy:
"You did not love the floor of a flat-car nor guns with canvas jackets and the smell of vaselined metal or a canvas that rain leaked through, although it is very fine under a canvas and pleasant with guns; but you loved someone else whom now you knew was not even to be pretended there; you seeing now very clearly and coldly--not so coldly as clearly and emptily."
Brilliant! Now how the hell could the man who wrote that turn around and write Old Man and the Sea?
If you can't judge a book by its cover, then you can't judge an author by one book. I resisted Hemingway for many years because of Old Man and the Sea, but I finally sucked it up and read Garden of Eden, a raw portrayal of the destruction of one relationship and the birth of another. Why is it that nobody ever tried to shove that book in my face?
In high school, I had a history teacher who hated Thomas Hardy, but the only book he'd read by ol' Tom was Return of the Native. Most of the favourites have at least one crappy book; Return of the Native is Thomas Hardy's. Doesn't it seem silly to hate Thomas Hardy if you've never read Tess of the D'Urbervilles?
For people who stopped taking English lit classes after high school or who have only taken generalized lit courses in university, it's hard to get a sample of which writers you do and do not like. Who knows why certain works get chosen over others? Maybe it's because they want to start you off with something easy so they choose something with little content, or maybe they want to choose works that generated the biggest reaction in their day. I mean, it's not an English teacher's job to make sure we enjoy what we're reading, right? They just want us to learn something.
So how do you know if you like a writer if you only have small samples of their work? Read more of them. Read for fun. Don't read just when you have to. And most importantly, don't throw a pile of books by one author through the paper shredder just because you didn't like the first one you read. How empty would my life be if I'd just stopped at Old Man and the Sea?
Here's an excerpt from A Farewell to Arms that I particularly enjoy:
"You did not love the floor of a flat-car nor guns with canvas jackets and the smell of vaselined metal or a canvas that rain leaked through, although it is very fine under a canvas and pleasant with guns; but you loved someone else whom now you knew was not even to be pretended there; you seeing now very clearly and coldly--not so coldly as clearly and emptily."
Brilliant! Now how the hell could the man who wrote that turn around and write Old Man and the Sea?
If you can't judge a book by its cover, then you can't judge an author by one book. I resisted Hemingway for many years because of Old Man and the Sea, but I finally sucked it up and read Garden of Eden, a raw portrayal of the destruction of one relationship and the birth of another. Why is it that nobody ever tried to shove that book in my face?
In high school, I had a history teacher who hated Thomas Hardy, but the only book he'd read by ol' Tom was Return of the Native. Most of the favourites have at least one crappy book; Return of the Native is Thomas Hardy's. Doesn't it seem silly to hate Thomas Hardy if you've never read Tess of the D'Urbervilles?
For people who stopped taking English lit classes after high school or who have only taken generalized lit courses in university, it's hard to get a sample of which writers you do and do not like. Who knows why certain works get chosen over others? Maybe it's because they want to start you off with something easy so they choose something with little content, or maybe they want to choose works that generated the biggest reaction in their day. I mean, it's not an English teacher's job to make sure we enjoy what we're reading, right? They just want us to learn something.
So how do you know if you like a writer if you only have small samples of their work? Read more of them. Read for fun. Don't read just when you have to. And most importantly, don't throw a pile of books by one author through the paper shredder just because you didn't like the first one you read. How empty would my life be if I'd just stopped at Old Man and the Sea?
