Yum

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
New York : Scribner, 2010.
xvi, 240 p., [14] p. of plates : ill., ports., facsimiles ; 23 cm

I've wanted to read this book for a while, especially since I added this new "restored edition" to the collection about five years ago, to replace our very old edition that was first published posthumously in 1964.

It is not a single narrative (or meal) but more like a buffet of Hemingway's Paris between the wars with interesting sections touching on writers such as Fitzgerald, Joyce, and Stein; living conditions for expats, early marriage, fatherhood, and the work of a struggling writer moving from journalism to fiction.

Some might find the discontinuous nature of the sections off-putting, but I found it quite wonderful.  Each section is interesting in its own right, and the collection as a whole leaves you satisfied, but curious for more Hemingway.

I would definitely recommend this book for any student interested in Hemingway, or in literary Paris in the 1920s.

Less Loathing Please

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
New York : Modern Library, 1996, c1971.
vii, 283 p. : ill. ; 21 cm.

I've seen Matt Taibbi referred to as an "heir" to Hunter Thompson's Gonzo journalism. I like Matt Taibbi and so I figured I'd take a stab at Thompson's Fear and Loathing. I also have had students interested in this book, and so I gave it a go. 

I probably read about 2/3 of the book and found it ok, but honestly a bit too hyper-masculine for my taste.  A lot of it reads like an extended brag about what an out-there, iconoclastic, mega-drug-abusing, cynical, passionate and alienated journalist Thompson is.  He loves both being immersed in US pop and consumer (and tourist) culture, all the while holding it in contempt and disdain.  It's good for a while, but maybe I just don't feel terribly moved by it.  I also think some of the power of Thompson was its shock value in the early 1970s and its rather gritty nastiness being a reflection of the even more obscene official business of the United States political system both in Vietnam and at home under the Nixon illegality.

Read it?  Sure, if you want a sampling of the 1970s tough guy anti-establishment journalism of the day.  Recommend it?  I probably won't, unless someone is looking for it.