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Sean

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

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Wolf Hall was the first audiobook I listened to, and the performance was spectacular. It's probably also part of my nature, but I can recall the Wolsey's pontifical (har har) voice vividly. I also have a 45min - 1hr commute every day so it's easy enough to plow through something like that.

 

Anyway, super psyched to maybe see the book club return!

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Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More, Thomas Cranmer, Thomas Wolsey...? Ah, Thomas Howard, Duke Norfolk and Thomas Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, I don't even think of them as having names outside their titles.

 

You know, I didn't notice it myself when reading, but it is funny. Within the medieval aristocracy, you get a lot of repetition of reasonably unique names because there were no surnames and "family" given names were used to establish kinship, but once surnames become a thing there's this collapse in given names, usually down to ones with Biblical roots, so by the time we get to the sixteenth century, shortly before humanism dumps a bunch of alternatives back into the onomastic lexicon, everyone's named one of literally a dozen names. I suppose you just have to sink or swim.

 

Also Thomas "Call-Me-Risley" Wriothesley, Thomas Audley, Thomas Wyatt, Thomas Avery and Thomas Seymour (although I don't think you actually meet that last one until Bring up the Bodies.

 

My name is Thomas, so I noticed it and thought it was hilarious. I'm pretty sure there are a few comments throughout the books about how many Thomas' there are, too. However, I was already familiar with most of the names and she rarely refers to them by first name, so I didn't find it to be a problem. Also, I grew up on A Song of Ice and Fire so I got really good at distinguishing between similar names.

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Exactly right. We're recording The Sun Also Rises next week.

 

Wolf Hall is on the back-burner for a while and it's totally my fault.  I've tackled the book three times and there's just too many Thomas's -- I'm going to get through it out of stubbornness.

 

So yeah, we're doing a new episode next week and, I hope, this podcast is back for good.

 

Damn. I haven't had the time to finish The Sun Also Rises yet. Maybe next time you could announce the upcoming book club book a bit earlier.

 

Ahh, Wolf Hall. So many Thomas's but only one "he". 

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This reading experience started romantically, almost ridiculously so.  I bought it in Paris at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore (the previous incarnation of which Hemingway frequented - and, more importantly, where Jesse and Celine reunited in Before Sunset).  Pure, unapologetic pornography for bibliophiles.  I sat outside, opened the first page, and the secondhand cigarette smoke around me instantly took on a weird benevolence.

 

I dug the dialogue.  It was rhythmic.  It was effortless.   Outright enviable.   The economy is as every bit as good - startlingly good - as everybody says.

 

All the same, I found this an emotionally very difficult read.  I began it at the beginning of six months abroad (very much an existential course correction) still phasing out of an anxiety issue ultimately rooted in missed opportunities and long-buried relationship what-ifs.  Not to overdramatise, but reading about jaded expatriates, unrealised love and people filling emotional voids with travel hit all the wrong nerves at all the wrong times.  I found the whole business just achingly sad, twisted the heart into some unfamiliar and unsettling configurations. I spent very little of the the subsequent plane and train trips reading; a few pages would be enough to trigger either a thoughtful tangent or an outright panic attack.

 

My time abroad was happily a lot more transformative than Jake's sad tale, ultimately taking me to a much better place.  Six months later, on the flight back, I was delighted to find i could safely able to resume without fear of triggering crippling psychological responses.  It was a meaningful bookend, bringing a lovely, measurable layer of personal growth and closure to the experience.

 

In the interim, I started and finished Infinite Jest.  I repeat: Infinite Jest was easier to read than these 122 pages.

 

I have some issues with the book itself - particularly with the way Brett felt more like a projection of the author's frustrations than a real human being - but they feel oddly secondary and irrelevant under the circumstances.  The story was good; the emotional imprint it left was far greater.  I wouldn't trade it for the world.

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I have some issues with the book itself - particularly with the way Brett felt more like a projection of the author's frustrations than a real human being 

 

She felt surprisingly even-handed to me given the prevailing views on female promiscuity at the time, but I feel the way you do more broadly about all the characters. I love Hemingway's style of writing dialog and his method of describing the setting but I really felt like he wrote this book as a fuck you to a bunch of spoiled rich kids he hated or maybe my knowledge of his backstory informs that opinion, I dunno.

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i'm very glad i decided to re-read this book in anticipation of the episode. there were aspects i enjoyed but my experience last year was too riddled in my own struggle trying to puzzle out why hemmingway was considered a quote unquote great american novelist and as a result looking for something more concrete (either in big characters, larger social commentary or clever structural elements) than what this book offers. i think i had to read the book to learn how to start to appreciate it, as this time i'm more relaxed with the material and the pace, prose style and subtle sadness of the characters is resonating with me way more.

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I also read this, finally, on account of the cast's purported return. I really liked it. It kept surprising me and by the end I had to abandon my preconceptions of Hemingway.

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Finally finished it and enjoyed it immensely.

Also, there's part of me that hopes this episode becomes the Duke Nukem Forever of bookcasts.

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Finally finished it and enjoyed it immensely.

Also, there's part of me that hopes this episode becomes the Duke Nukem Forever of bookcasts.

So, it'll come out in five years and be below average?

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So, it'll come out in five years and be below average?

more the mythos and atmosphere of being released than quality.

I can always count on idle books episodes to be of higher quality

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Exactly right. We're recording The Sun Also Rises next week.

 

Any plans on airing the episode?

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“I made the unfortunate mistake, for a writer, of first having been Mr. Jake Barnes.”

 

This is a fantastic read. Thanks!

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