So, yeah, I've been waiting to tell you about this great Hemingway book I just read, called A Moveable Feast. It's about his years in Paris, 1921–’26. You can hardly stop reading when you've started, it's like a slide. Nothing to make you tired, and little wasted; he works efficiently & says just what he needs to. There's a lot of stuff in there about famous people he knew—writers and artists, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein—but, too, he turns up a lot of details, cagily, about his working methods and his feelings about his work.

It was either six or eight flights up to the top floor and it was very cold and I knew how much it would cost for a bundle of small twigs, three wire-wrapped packets of short, half-pencil length pieces of split pine to catch fire from the twigs, and then the bundle of half-dried lengths of hard wood that I must buy to make a fire that would warm the room. So I went to the far side of the street to look up at the roof in the rain and see if any chimneys were going, and how the smoke blew. There was no smoke and I thought about how the chimney would be cold and might not draw and of the room possibly filling with smoke, and the fuel wasted, and the money gone with it, and I walked on in the rain.

There's a whole digression about horse racing and how he controlled his use of it for money and the excitement of the vagaries of racing. I thought of Robert Irwin, another great artist who made a living betting on horses for awhile before getting out of it and, luckily, not getting addicted. You can read about that in the great Lawrence Weschler book Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.

Old Hem says something in there about his "distrust of adjectives" and his love of the mot juste, the "one true word" that says just what it needs to say, and I could understand that because I just read a book that was about 90% adjectives and none of them said anything useful. I wouldn't believe any guff, if anyone tried to say it, about this style being truer, in the sense of veracity, than any other. If anything this book tells a surprising story about how much you can distort and alter by leaving things out or by other true-seeming tricks of the pen. But this sparse, declarative style, which is marked also by a preponderance of actions and relations instead of glossy, emotive descriptions, this style which I also observe in other great writers I dig like J. M. Coetzee and Colm Tóibín, is so true in another sense, in the sense of being sharp and strong, like an arrow flies true, of hitting you hard, when it hits you. As a work of imagination, this book is very pleasing and has many useful insights for all of us here on the Letters to an Unknown Audience staff, and to all of you poor souls who read it.