Moby Dick is your grandpa telling a really long, wild old war story, and you at rapt attention until he’s good and ready to stop. Great stuff.

I can’t pick out specific passages right now, but I did this multiple times each with Madame Bovary and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Hemingway is revered for telling stories that common people connected with emotionally, in plain, short, simple prose.

I’m not his biggest fan, but he had a gift for putting emotion into very few words that don’t look like they carry a lot of emotion.

The short story “Hills Like White Elephants” is, to me, his greatest triumph. It’s about an abortion. But it’s just two people talking for a short while, and he never once says the word abortion.

The worst book I’ve ever read – plot, characters, dialogue – was Hannibal (Thomas Harris). I ended up reading it first after seeing the movie versions of the others, but I will never read the other books and probably never watch the movie of this one. I despised this one so much.