Why am I passionate about this?
I am a retired attorney. In my professional life, I had no connection to the performing arts. At an early age I became an opera lover. Living in the New York Metropolitan area, I had ample opportunity to indulge this love by going to live performances. Pretty soon, I was going to performances several times a week, not just opera but also symphonic concerts and theater (musicals and plays, on and off Broadway). While that frequency had to diminish when my professional life began, I still racked up over four thousand performances over the past sixty-plus years. For each of those performances, I wrote a review of what I saw.
Leslie's book list on novels that have great screen or TV adaptations
Why did Leslie love this book?
I'm not sure the 1957 movie version of Hemingway's 1926 first novel, with terrific performances by Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner, and Errol Flynn, is a great movie, but when I first saw it on my old black and white TV in the early sixties, I was so deeply affected. I had to immediately read the book.
Hemingway, was, of course, himself an expatriate American in Paris in the 1920s. What I love about the book is Hemingway's ability to capture the atmosphere of the time and place, as his Lost Generation characters booze, fight, love, and perhaps try to come to terms with the life they have created for themselves. Then there is that impossible love story between war-injured Jake and Brett!
7 authors picked The Sun Also Rises as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Jake Barnes is a man whose war wound has made him unable to have sex—and the promiscuous divorcée Lady Brett Ashley. Jake is an expatriate American journalist living in Paris, while Brett is a twice-divorced Englishwoman with bobbed hair and numerous love affairs, and embodies the new sexual freedom of the 1920s. The novel is a roman à clef: the characters are based on real people in Hemingway's circle, and the action is based on real events, particularly Hemingway's life in Paris in the 1920s and a trip to Spain in 1925 for the Pamplona festival and fishing in the…