In it was my copy of The Sun Also Rises from junior-year of high school. I decided it was worth checking out again and it turns out it was a pretty good book. Part of the problem of reading books like that in high school English classes is that you just don't pick up on everything you should.

I don't meet metaphor, allusions, and allegory so much–that's what we were being trained to look for. In fact, part of the fun of reading a book from your high school English class is seeing all the random sentences you underlined.

• Pg. 22. "Everybody's sick. I'm sick too."
• Pg. 81. "I was a fool to go away," she said.
• Pg. 145. "It's no life being a steer," Robert Cohn said.

That last one is probably the only one that deserved underlining.

I don't mean that stuff. There's an emotional maturity a book like The Sun Also Rises assumes in the reader, I think. I don't know that I had it at 16. Or maybe I'm just forgetting. But this time reading it, when Brett told Jake she went to San Sebastian with Cohn, I felt the hit in my gut. I knew what it meant. Did I then? Again, hard to say. Maybe I did, but was too focused on the steer allegories to pay attention to, you know, the actual story.

My still-favorite Hemingway novel is For Whom The Bell Tolls. But I was glad to check this one out again.