I am a reader. Not a voracious one, but I am a reader of maybe ten novels a year. I tend to alternate cycles between podcasts and books to whatever balance my schedule allows. I'm currently on the reading cycle and boy do I have some thoughts.
I just finished two books: The Sun Also Rises, by Earnest Hemingway, and The Women, by Kristin Hannah. Perhaps two more disparate books there were not. Maybe that's what brought me here today to exercise my thoughts.
The Sun Also Rises was my first foray into Hemingway. All I knew of him was Paris, The Lost Generation, and masculinity; I was going in near blind to his actual writing style. What I discovered on his pages was emotion, vulnerability (even in a characters inability to be vulnerable), consideration, fear, love, worry, self-preservation, exploration, comfort, and some version of friendship. The story was real, even when the characters were being fake. The story was honest, even when the characters were not, and as much was said between the lines as in them. I was with Jake on all his travels and I believed in all his decisions and actions.
The Women was my third Kristin Hannah novel. I enjoyed The Nightingale, The Four Winds was ok, I loathed The Women. The Women is billed as the untold story of the women serving in Vietnam who did so much for our country but who got no credit, respect, or status upon return home after their tours, and who are still, in 2025, not often discussed or featured in Vietnam War stories. I don't know too much about the war - pretty much what film and TV has shown me - so I thought this would be a great place to jump in.
Wow. This book was awful. It was a romance novel disguised as a real novel. Hannah spent 3 pages describing the emotions her main character felt when a man touched the small of her back, and one measly paragraph on the eight hours of triage medical aid the character provided after a mass casualty event at one of the wars bloodiest bases.
This whole book felt like Hannah read some Wikipedia pages and turned it into a book. Nothing was explored in depth, nothing felt like it had real stakes, nothing felt earned. Every problem this character had was solved in the following chapter and then a new one started up that was solved in the chapter after that.
For this book to be celebrated as a feminist account of the strength of women in the Vietnam War is bollocks. The main character in this book didn't make a single decision of her own - every fulcrum point decision in this woman's life was made by a man (except the very last one to move to Montana).
In just 250ish pages, Hemingway took me to Paris and Spain in the 1920s and showed me the mood, the tension, the sensibilities, the culture, the weather and the people of the locales he visited. In 480+ pages, Hannah merely told me some headline going-ons of the Vietnam War and its fallout, but managed to smother me with relentless description of 20 year old romance.
I'll be sticking to the classics for a little bit...or maybe hoping back over to Podcast land.
