Which of his books should I start with? Does it matter?

Beginner Tier:
>The Sun Also Rises
>Old Man and the Sea
Mid Tier:
>A Farewell to Arms
>Death in the Afternoon
High Tier:
>For Whom the Bell Tolls
God Tier:
>Old Man and the Sea (but you actually get it this time)
>A Moveable Feast
>Nick Adams Stories

Autist can’t read Hemingway because they can’t pick up on subtext

Ding Ding Ding. We have a winner.

>Someone on lit actually reads
Check this fag out guys

Fuck off, you peanut-brained nigger.

Cunt

lol what

The one where he talks about Fitzgerald's lips and dick for an inordinate amount of time.

Do you have the passage

The first time I ever met Scott Fitzgerald a very strange thing happened. Many strange things happened with Scott but this one I was never able to forget. He had come into the Dingo bar in the rue Delambre where I was sitting with some completely worthless characters, had introduced himself and introduced a tall, pleasant man who was with him as Dunc Chaplin, the famous pitcher. I had not followed Princeton baseball and had never heard of Dunc Chaplin but he was extraordinarily nice, unworried, relaxed and friendly and I much preferred him to Scott.

Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty. His chin was well built and he had good ears and a handsome, almost beautiful, unmarked nose. This should not have added up to a pretty face, but that came from the coloring, the very fair hair and the mouth. The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.

I was very curious to see him and I had been working very hard all day and it seemed quite wonderful that here should be Scott Fitzgerald and the great Dunc Chaplin whom I had never heard of but who was now my friend. Scott did not stop talking and since I was embarrassed by what he said—it was all about my writing and how great it was—I kept on looking at him closely and noticed instead of listening. We still went under the system, then, that praise to the face was open disgrace. Scott had ordered champagne and he and Dunc Chaplin and I drank it together with, I think, some of the worthless characters. I do not think that Dunc or I followed the speech very closely, for it was a speech and I kept on observing Scott. He was lightly built and did not look in awfully good shape, his face being faintly puffy. His Brooks Brothers clothes fitted him well and he wore a white shirt with a buttoned-down collar and a Guard’s tie. I thought I ought to tell him about the tie, maybe, because they did have British in Paris and one might come into the Dingo—there were two there at the time—but then I thought the hell with it and I looked at him some more. It turned out later he had bought the tie in Rome.

I wasn’t learning very much from looking at him now except that he had well shaped, capable-looking hands, not too small, and when he sat down on one of the bar stools I saw that he had very short legs. With normal legs he would have been perhaps two inches taller. We had finished the first bottle of champagne and started on the second and the speech was beginning to run down.

Finally when we were eating the cherry tart and had a last carafe of wine he said, “Yon know I never slept with anyone except Zelda.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I thought I had told you.”

“No. You told me a lot of things but not that.”

“That is what I have to ask you about.”

“Good. Go on.”

“Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally. She said it was a matter of measurements. I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly.”

“Come out to the office,” I said.

“Where is the office?”

“Le water,” I said.

We came back into the room and sat down at the table.

“You’re perfectly fine,” I said. “You are O. K. There’s nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile.”

“Those statues may not be accurate.”

“They are pretty good. Most people would settle for them.” “But why would she say it?”

“To put you out of business. That’s the oldest way in the world of putting people out of business. Scott, you asked me to tell you the truth and I can tell you a lot more but this is the absolute truth and all you need. You could have gone to see a doctor.”

“I didn’t want to. I wanted you to tell me truly.”

“Now do you believe me?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Come on over to the Louvre,” I said. “It’s just down the street and across the river.”

We went over to the Louvre and he looked at the statues but still he was doubtful about himself.

“It is not basically a question of the size in repose,” I said. “It is the size that it becomes. It is also a question of angle.” I explained to him about using a pillow and a few other things that might be useful for him to know.

“There is one girl” he said, “who has been very nice to me. But after what Zelda said—”

“Forget what Zelda said,” I told him. “Zelda is crazy. There’s nothing wrong with you. Just have confidence and do what the girl wants. Zelda just wants to destroy you.”

“You don’t know anything about Zelda.”

“All right,” I said. “Let it go at that. But you came to lunch to ask me a question and I’ve tried to give you an honest answer.”

But he was still doubtful.

In Our Time

Short stories are best to start off with for sure.

Try:

The Battler
Hills Like White Elephants
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macromber
A Clean Well-Lighted Place
The Killers
The Snows of Kilimanjaro

If you like those, try some novels.

Farewell to Arms, Old Man & Sea, etc

Death In The Afternoon is actually really good, although you have to overcome your feelings of revulsion and contempt for the whole disgusting business of bull-"fighting".

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