Book Notes: "On Paris" by Ernest Hemingway

On Paris by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This collection of journalistic pieces was written for the Toronto Star in the early 1920s and focus on Paris. Hemingway's early work here is part travel writer and part gossip columnist. The style would seem out of place today and, from personal experience, editors are only to ready to "correct" such work written in the "your correspondent" third person. It is a shame, in that Hemingway's style is very readable and rather witty. I doubt articles written about a foreign city would be of interest today, but at the time, many North Americans were keen on the exchange rate with France and Paris, of course, was a major destination. Moreover, I doubt that the "Orientalist" approach to reporting on foreign countries would be so readily apply to today's France, although destinations that still remain "foreign" to most Westerners may receive this treatment as a matter of course. This is a short but fruitful read and I was particularly impressed by the format and the cover, which makes for a robust yet accessible paperback style. I rarely comment on this aspect of a book but the cover style is remarkable.



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Book Notes: 'The Valley of the Moon' by Jack London

The Valley of the Moon by Jack London




Others have suggested this was the forerunner to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, but this is only evident in the third book. I was surprised by a dead-end thread character who reappears only briefly to show the changes in the prize-fighting protagonist as he becomes wiser. The usual Jack London class consciousness is evident but this time he seems to highlight the false consciousness of the proletariat not as a consequence of the system per se, but as the fault of an individual's lack of imagination. Although somewhat the epic, an interesting read that gripped me whenever I picked it up. And surprisingly, no classic London macabre ending to regret, although the climax is the weaker for it.



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Book Notes: 'Animal Farm' by George Orwell

Animal Farm by George Orwell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


As I read the various characters' speeches, I was thinking of essay questions. "Read Major's speech and identify the theories of the great economic thinkers"; obviously Marx, but also Ricardo, Spencer et al. This Everyman's version contains a useful chronology outlining Orwell's life, and at each point, what was happening in literary circles and world events. Two of Orwell's (Blair's) prefaces were included as appendices. It would have been helpful to have access to (or, rather, noticed) such useful thoughts from the author in high school, but I suppose that such information would have been lost in my inexperience. The introduction by Julian Symons is concise but helpful, and now, of course, I must read Sir Bernard Crick's George Orwell: A Life.



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