"To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before . . . I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book . . . the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it." (Montaigne, Book II, Essay 10 (publ. 1580))

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway, 1929)

This tells the story of an American serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in WW I. He falls in love with an English nurse; she attends him following an injury and they fall in love.

He returns to the front, but the Germans overwhelm the Italians and the protagonist eventually deserts as he figures out that scapegoats are being sought. Finds the nurse, and they cross the border into Switzerland.

I liked it, but not nearly as much as For Whom The Bell Tolls.

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