A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Did you like Midnight in Paris? If so, you're going to love this book.
Hemingway wrote this memoir about life in Paris during the Roaring Twenties when he was in his mid-twenties. He was married, and they had a baby and a cat, and his job was to write. He wrote in cafes, and drank wine and whiskey. Sometimes he bet on horses and and sometimes he traveled with his wife. They were poor and happy.
He hung out with writers like Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. I loved reading about their relationships and Hemingway's writing process. He somehow could firmly decide whether his own writing was good or not. How is this possible when it's a qualitative matter? "If it's honest and if it's true..."
My favorite story was when he went on a road trip with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scott had bouts of absurdity (the car they were driving had no roof so they had to pull over constantly when it rained, for example, but that could be blamed on Zelda), yet Ernie's loyalty to him in spite of it because of his talent in writing The Great Gatsby makes me love him all the more.
I was surprised to find that the book ended with a few stories about skiing. Their skiing could be hairbrained and dangerous, but so was letting the cat be the baby-sitter.
Even now I'm wondering what the heck was so genius about this book when it was so simple. Maybe it's something in his unadorned, honest observations.
General consensus: Knock yourself out gorging on this masterpiece.
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