In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway is not my favorite author. I thought I was DONE reading all the recommended classics on all the lists, but here was yet ONE MORE!

This is a bunch of short stories. Hemingway conveys emotion in very few words. I can see why he was famous, but his deep sadness comes across in all his writing. So, I don't like to read him (except The Old Man and the Sea). This motivated me to watch the Ken Burns PBS documentary on Hemingway. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books to Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

Following upon the appearance of two small volumes in Paris, In Our Time was Hemingway’s first full-length book, and his first published in the United States. It is composed of sixteen stories, each followed by a brief prose interlude—often a paragraph, never longer than a single page—labeled as a numbered “chapter.” The chapters—scenes of peril and desperation drawn from the battlefield, the bull ring, and the annals of American urban violence—act as a kind of visceral punctuation to the stories, giving an ominous historical context. The disciplined directness of Hemingway’s expression—the way each word seems chosen and set with care, the modulation of cadence, the telling use of quiet—informs a style of stunning alertness as he explores youth’s conversion from innocence to experience. Although the character of Nick Adams is not central to every tale, the course of his coming-of-age shapes the book’s development. We share his youth and his admiration for his doctor father, the confusions of his first romance, his friendships, the aftermath of his wartime ordeal, and his fragile determination to make a home for himself in a homeless world. All the while, the something out there that’s not fooling infiltrates the space between the lines to intensify the hues of Hemingway’s attention to life, love, and death. Despite—or perhaps because of—its often miniaturist scale, In Our Time may well be the truest expression of its author’s prodigious gifts.