A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway, 1964 ★★★★

Dining on the Past

Memory, like other intoxicants, has the power to delight, captivate, and leave a certain melancholy after the thrill goes away. That not-original notion came over me several times when reading A Moveable Feast, a collection of memories held dear by a famously unsentimental writer.

It must be said up front that of all Ernest Hemingway’s books, A Moveable Feast might be his most straight-up enjoyable. It combines his terse, declamatory style with a vibrant and at times colorful account of what it was like to live in Paris a century ago, when so much of our culture’s modern age was being formed.

Like In Our Time one of Hemingway’s most novelistic non-novels, A Moveable Feast’s narrative comes in the form of vignettes, each presenting a different aspect of the author’s time in Paris as a young writer. The end result is like popcorn to the Papa fan:

Tappan’s Burro – Zane Grey, 1923 ★★

Nature Gives and Takes

Nature writing has been with us longer than the printing press; whether it be by poets or philosophers it is one of the taproots of literary expression. Sometimes a nature book like The Hidden Life Of Trees will even sneak into the best-seller lists.

Zane Grey leveraged his popularity as a western writer to indulge his love for nature writing. His books teem with descriptions of natural wonder; he traveled the world seeking places unspoiled by men and considered the sea and the desert his religion.

If you follow the popular view, Grey was all about shootouts and dry gulching and riders of the purple sage. But read him and his true passion becomes clear. He was into rivers and mesas first, stories second, if that.

The Go-Go Years – John Brooks, 1973 ★★★½

Capitalism Takes A Trip

At the dawn of the 1970s, terms like “conglomerates” and “hedge funds” fell outside the typical business vernacular. Corporate raiders were a frightening novelty. Could Wall Street have been so innocent not all that long ago?

John Brooks, a financial-news reporter for The New Yorker, had fun explaining how much of the wider cultural craziness of the 1960s wound up trickling into the world of big business, stocks, and bonds. The Go-Go Years details a ten-year span where once-staid brokers began growing out their hair, wearing patterned ties to work, and endangering capitalism at its core by chasing trends and ignoring fundamentals: