Guys I’m 9 chapters in to A Farewell to Arms and frankly I can’t wait to say farewell to this book. It is so inconceivably boring that I’ve had to switch between reading it and listening to an audiobook just to focus and pay attention. Admittedly there’s time for it to get better, but every time Hemingway describes scenery I want to bang my head into a wall.

The amount of “there were” and “there was” phrases stand out even more if you’re listening to the book, and it makes the whole thing sound passive and stagnant. Well, in keeping with the idea that Hemingway has only two conjunctions in his vocabulary, I can do that too: War is bad, love is good. The end. I don’t care if it’s a stylistic choice, but it does nothing to immerse me as a reader. For me one of the most important things about a book is exposition, the structure of how it’s written. I love seeing evidence of a mastery of the craft. Hemingway doesn’t deliver. The characters sound so dimwitted, I don’t care what happens to them, and as of right now, the war feels like an afterthought. I forget it’s even happening. And I don’t care that war makes people do desperate things: if characters in a lauded love story kiss after like fifty pages, I’m not invested. The way Hemingway talks about love is just stupid, or rather the way he makes his characters talk about it is stupid. I can already tell neither of them will have much spine, and Catherine is just going to say whatever our narrator wants to hear since she’s every soldier’s fever dream. Speaking of our narrator, he talks about the war with all the excitement of filing an insurance claim. Being monotone does not make you sound profound. As far as I’m concerned, this guy is the personification of a brooding mustache.

I felt much the same way when I had to read “The Old Man and the Sea” back in high school, and I’m just convinced Hemingway isn’t for me. If anyone likes this book at all, please tell me why because I don’t get it.