Title: True at First Light
Author: Ernest Hemingway
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 322
Rating: 3/5
I picked this book up in a charity shop, and I felt quite excited about it to begin with because I didn’t know that it even existed. Then I started reading it, and I realised why it wasn’t one that’s often talked about. It’s just not particularly good.
Oh sure, it’s well-written, but you’d expect that from Ernest Hemingway. It’s also occasionally interesting due to the fact that it’s semi-autobiographical. For example, there was a little story about George Orwell that left me wondering whether it had actually happened or whether it was just an invention for the sake of the plot.
But for the most part, it’s just your typical Hemingway ideas and themes, following a mission to kill a lion somewhere in Africa. It actually made me laugh out loud at one point because Hemingway tried to take on vegetarianism with that old argument of, “BUT PLANTS HAVE FEELINGS, DOE.”
For the record, even if plants did have feelings, more of them are harvested to feed animals than humans anyway, and so being vegetarian (or better yet, vegan) would still lead to the least amount of suffering.
Anyway, all in all it was a forgettable read and one that I doubt I’ll even remember in a couple of months. I can only really see there being any value in reading it if you’re a die-hard Hemingway fan who wants to read everything that he’s ever written. I guess I fall into that category.
Perhaps the best marker of what I thought of this book is the fact that after I finished reading it, I finally got round to removing Hemingway from my list of favourite authors on my Goodreads page. He wrote a few great books, but he also wrote a lot of dross, like this.
