Inside Jacket

Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American author, and a brand of manly man rarely seen these days. A womanizer, a heavy drinker, a hunter and a sport fisherman, Hemingway loved adventure, the outdoors, and a challenge. While in the South of Florida, I recently had the opportunity to visit his home in Key West, where he composed some of his most famous works.

During my visit I saw a portion of Hemingway’s collection of books (it included John Steinbeck’s The Long Valley, From Jungle Roots by Marcos Spinelli, and Cranberry Red by E.B. Garside), and the furniture and house he and his second wife called home for eight years. From Key West’s largest residential swimming pool to the legions of cats that live on the grounds, Hemingway Home provided insight into the man and mind behind The Sun Also Rises, as well as a nice way to spend an afternoon.

Take a Tour.

The Guardian has a quiz about bookish things in 2010. I got 13 out of 18.

Rebecca Skloot, easily the author of the year in my opinion, is interviewed at The Rumpus. She talks about Chicago, Oprah buying the movie rights to her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and the demand for public appearances.

So I am reading Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand at the moment. Seabiscuit, Hillenbrand’s first book, is one of my favourite books of all time so I was very excited to see what Unbroken was like. Seabiscuit is the story of a horse and I am not fan of horse racing but Hillenbrand has a wonderful way of making real-life drama come alive on the page. Her descriptions of Seabiscuit’s races are vivid and tremendously exciting. The reader is urging on the horse while blazing through the author’s text to see who wins.

Unbroken again has a sporting element, as it focuses on an American Olympic calibre middle distance runner Louis Zamperini, but the real story concerns Zamperini’s experiences during World War II as a member of a bomber crew in the South Pacific.

The book started very slowly for me and I became concerned that Hillenbrand had already produced her best with Seabiscuit. For a few days, I left the book alone before returning to carry on reading. Last night I read two chapters and Unbroken reached the level of excellence found in Seabiscuit. Hillenbrand describes a bombing mission in one chapter and quickly follows it with a chapter where the American bombers, now on the ground, are themselves bombed by the Japanese. Both chapters were stunning.

We experienced a total lunar eclipse here last night (see my snap below) in North America, the first one for 372 years on that occurred on a Winter Solstice. I was torn between reading Unbroken and rushing out onto the deck to see the eclipse. Luckily, an eclipse comes on pretty slowly so I was able to finish my chapter before seeing the Moon slowly become covered by the Earth’s shadow.

So who is Laura Hillenbrand? She’s 43, lives in Washington DC and she’s only written two books. It’s sad to hear that she suffers from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which means she rarely leaves the house. This illness explains why she has such a low profile and has just two books to her name.

Also at The Guardian, author Jilly Cooper writes about her hero and uses this wonderful sentence: “But, most blissfully of all, he insisted on sticking his c**k out the whole time – so the hundreds of waiting photographers had great difficulty getting any pictures.”