Book # 82 A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

I finished reading A Farewell to Arms a couple of hours ago.The ending of the book is still stuck in my head. I had been enjoying the book over the past week and I was enjoying it a fair amount. The final chapter provoked emotion in me as a reader. I wanted to punch Ernest Hemingway in the face for ending the book the way he did. It also made me consider the book a classic.

I was fascinated by Hemingway's writing style. The language was plain. Many sentences were short. Others excessively long and the sentence would fill an entire paragraph and there would be many things described in the sentence and the sentence would meander and the sentence would contain no commas and instead of using commas the author would just use the word "and" and I would imagine the voice of the actor that played Hemingway in Midnight in Paris and that voice would be reading these words to me in my head.  The style was the opposite of D.H. Lawrence. Emotions were not described. Things would just occur and the reader would have to figure out the feelings of the characters on their own and this would be based on their actions and their dialogue. The style was unique.

The story is about an American in Italy. He drives an ambulance for the Italian army and the time is during the first World War and he meets a British nurse and he falls in love with the nurse and then the nurse becomes pregnant and then the man gets injured in the war and he recovers and goes back to the war and he is forced to flee after the army turns on him and he tries to find the nurse and then they try to escape to Switzerland and the ending is tragic.

I had not expected it, but A Farewell to Arms makes my top 50. A+


My updated rankings.


1.Invisible Man
2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
3. A Farewell to Arms
4.The Stand
5. The Name of the Rose
6. Wind in the Willows
7. Rebecca
8. Sons and Lovers
9. Winnie-the-Pooh
10. Mrs. Dalloway