Book Chopping

Writers on books they would pare down if they could. I fully appreciate Joyce Carol Oates on Ernest Hemingway: "There’s much too much smoking, drinking, fishing and hunting in Hemingway, and it could all be cut out. If that is cut out about 70 percent of Hemingway would go." In Our Time (the only Hemingway I've read) is probably not the example to judge him by, but it was enough to stop me from wanting to investigate further. Ruggedness has never seemed more tedious.