And, my God, it was SO BORING.
The Sun Also Rises has officially overtaken Frankenstein at the top of my list of most boring books ever written. Why is the book so boring, you ask?
NOTHING.
HAPPENS.
The book goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on for 251 pages about absolutely nothing. It is the Seinfeld of literature, except Seinfeld. . . . actually, I can't find any difference between this book and Seinfeld; neither were funny, and nothing ever happened. There's no moral. No character development. No conflict.
The book begins with our narrator, Jake Barnes, who is suffering from an unknown injury that appears to keep him from having a relationship, Brett Ashley, a woman who jumps from man to man for reasons I can't quite figure out, Robert Cohn, a Jewish boxer-turned-failed-novelist who's so in love with Brett that he practically stalks her (and gets enough 1920s anti-semitism thrown at him for it to fill a bucket), Mike, who I think is Brett's fiance for most of the book and is literally drunk off his ass in every single scene he's in, and Bill, who doesn't appear to have any significance to the book whatsoever.
The book ends with with our narrator, Jake Barnes, who is suffering from an unknown injury that appears to keep him from having a relationship, Brett Ashley, a woman who jumps from man to man for reasons I can't quite figure out, Robert Cohn, a Jewish boxer-turned-failed-novelist who's so in love with Brett that he practically stalks her (and gets enough 1920s anti-semitism thrown at him for it to fill a bucket), Mike, who I think is Brett's fiance for most of the book and is literally drunk off his ass in every single scene he's in, and Bill, who doesn't appear to have any significance to the book whatsoever.
None of the characters have any personality whatsoever, with the minor exception of Mike, who, as I've said, is always drunk. The guy that says "I'm tight" or "I'm drunk" is usually Mike (or Bill; one of them gets drunk all the time and the other is utterly useless). You can't tell one character apart from another in dialogue because they all talk the same; it doesn't help that the one woman in the book refers to herself as a "chap" at least once.
The one good thing about the book is I think my plot-starved brain read some symbolism into the actions of a few characters that translates into how people should write. That's it.
If I ever express interest in reading this book ever again, please kick me in the knees.