A farewell to arms.

So this my (Cecelia's) first post. I have read embarrassingly few books in this cloud. My proudest accomplishment thus far is ‘a farewell to arms’ by Ernest Hemingway. It was a book that I was required to study in year 12.

I have a lot of thoughts on a farewell to arms, my number one thought being this: I HATE IT! There are a number of reasons why I feel this way.

Firstly, I had to study it. Usually you end up hating texts/films that you have to study. For example, I love the film ‘look both ways’ because I never had to study it. I hate the book ‘catcher in the rye’ because it is total whiny drivel. And I had to study it.

Secondly, Year 12 sucked. Second worst year ever!* So that means I probably wasn’t in quite the right headspace to be reading this ridiculously depressing book.

But I should get on to talking about the book. (Is this the part where I put a spoiler alert? I don’t know if I’ll spoil anything so I’ll warn you just in case.) The protagonist is an alcoholic and quite slutty and I very much didn’t like him. He fell in love with a girl. Whenever they were together the pages were filled metaphors for lovemaking. Hint: if he is describing her hair, chances are they are doing it. Whenever they were apart, the weather was crappy. If it was raining someone probably just died.

Oh my, thinking about this is giving me English flashbacks.

I don’t like Ernest Hemingway. Kat Stradford of 10 things I hate about you was right when she said “Romantic? Hemingway? He was an abusive, alcoholic misogynist who squandered half of his life hanging around Picasso trying to nail his leftovers.”

Well, right about the abusive alcoholic misogynist bit. The Picasso stuff I am not so sure about.

Lastly, I have a confession to make. I did not read the entire book. HOWEVER, I still count it because I had to endure countless English classes of studying it and I got an  A fricken+ on the text response for it so I think I must have soaked enough in to be allowed to count it.

Im sorry, Im not very good at this sort of review-y thing. Perhaps I’ll get better the more I read and review. Also, I’m trying to get my hands on that magical essay that I wrote.**

*2003 takes the cake.

** Its only comparatively magical to the start of year 12. I went from getting a D to an A+ in English in one year.