I am still thinking about the books that young men read/should read.

Of course, I am also thinking of this in a limited sense.  I am a heterosexual white male of generally upper middle class background. Economically, I spent a certain amount of my childhood closer to the lower class than the middle class, but culturally, my upbringing was always that of the solidly liberal bourgeosie. I am, in fact, very close to the socio-economic ethnic group skewered by the website Stuff White People Like.

This is all a digression by way of an excuse for the limits of my recommendations and criticisms. The young person I am modeling is someone like an idealized memory of myself and product of my class and ethnic background.

But to continue…

The young man fascinated by Hemingway is an enduring image. Whether it is the young frontiersman with a copy of Nick Adams Stories in his backpack or would-be, ex-patriate, Euro-sophisticate with A Moveable Feast or The Sun Also Rises sitting next to their coffee.

The image is always, in my mind, of the works of the young Hemingway (except for A Moveable Feast, which was written by an older Hemingway, but is about the young Hemingway’s days in Paris).

Not being the outdoorsy type, I was always a fan of the Parisian Hemingway.

When I was in Paris and then in Madrid, there was a small coterie of us – young, white, and reasonably well educated – who followed Ernest so far as to develop a taste for the spectacle of bullfighting.

This would surprise those who know me now as a vegetarian. They would also be surprised that I cannot, even now, bring myself to condemn my youthful fetish for this particular form of animal violence and cruelty.

We stuffed copies of Death in the Afternoon in our pockets and defended the styles of matadors who died before we born and who we only knew in the pages of books. We even read The Dangerous Summer.

These were the days before Amazon.com, so we were forced scoured bookshelves for whatever we could find to feed our interest.

It’s been over fifteen years since I ate meat. It’s been over seventeen years since I saw a bullfight – and nearly that long since I read Death in the Afternoon (though I still read The Sun Also Rises, with its bullfighting sequences, once a year).

I now longer know where I’m going with this. Just mining my memories, now, I suppose. Perhaps I’m still asking what happened the canon? Why don’t young people read the same books I did? Why aren’t the influenced, moved, and motivated by the same things as me? But, I suppose, my parents looked at me and asked themselves the same questions.