A Moveable Feast of Moveable Texts

Title: A Moveable Feast
Author: Ernest Hemingway
Host: Linda and Heathcliff

It's one thing to come to book club anticipating a lively discussion. It's another to try and participate in three lively, concurrent conversations because we'd all read different books. Our first clue was when Gail launched the discussion with a question about the chapter entitled The Pilot Fish and the Rich, at which point both Liz and Shirley started thumbing wildly through their copies, which included no such chapter.

The Setup

Well, you can see the problem here.

What Margy read, 1996

What Steve read, which he's had since college

What Joanne read, first edition

What Linda and Gail read, published in 2010

What Shirley and Liz read, 1996

 

 Insights and Opinions

+ While you'd think this would be a major setback, no. Being word people, nobody in our group is stingy with words. However, everybody talked at once, so note-taking was impossible.

+  Reading A Moveable Feast, whichever edition each of us read, was a great deal of fun given the fact that The Paris Wife by Paula McLain was last month's read. Beginning with this novel written from Hemingway's first wife Hadley's point of view and then following up with Hemingway's own recollections of events from their time together added a richness to A Moveable Feast it might otherwise have lacked.

+ Those who'd read A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition, which includes material eliminated from the first published editions as well as a forward by Patrick Hemingway and an introduction by Sean Hemingway had the benefit of more  of Hemingway's own reminiscences, however fragmentary.

From Publisher's Weekly: "This restored version of Hemingway's posthumously published memoir has been revised to reflect the author's original intentions. The result is less a fluid narrative than an academic exercise, with the bulk of the story—Hemingway's travels, escapades, encounters with other writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald—followed by material read by his son and grandson, and some additional sketches and fragments excluded from the final draft."

+ By the end of our session, those of us who hadn't been lucky enough to read the restored edition resolved to do so, along with The Sun Also Rises and Hemingway's Boat by Paul Hendrickson, which claims in its subtitle to include "everything he loved in life and lost.

+ Important safety tip: When reading a classic with your book club, be sure you choose a specific edition ahead of time and let everybody else know what it is.

+ To make up for the lack of intelligent content describing this month's discussion, extra spaces have been added between paragraphs.

Oddments and Telling Details

+ Congratulations to Linda for things you'll find out about later.

+ Congratulations to Steve on the publication of his new memoir Canoeing The Boundary Waters Wilderness: A Sawbill Log -- new from the History Press. Those of us who were together for the session came away with autographed first editions. Lovely.

+ To find out what we're reading next, look here.