A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway is probably my least favorite book that I teach. When I reread it last year, I was surprisingly happy with it--I very much disliked it in high school--but, this year, I was over it. Perhaps, unlike The Scarlet Letter, it cannot withstand a yearly reread.

After reading the book, I asked my two junior classes what they thought. This is a guilty pleasure of teaching. Even though most of them didn't actually read the novel, it's fun to just sit around and talk books. I think that my distaste for the book had unfortunately rubbed off on my second period, because in an astonishing turn of events, the majority of that class preferred The Scarlet Letter, with its dense, elevated language and everything. They kept asking me, "Why do we read this?" or "Why is this a classic?" and I honestly found myself sputtering, without a good answer, other than my usual calling into question of the designation of "classic," which, at this moment, just seemed like a cop-out.

Clearly, he is a good example of a modernist writer, with his minimalistic, sometimes stream of conscience-like prose, and his disillusioned characters. But I had trouble really uncovering the merits of his novel as more than an artifact from modern literary circles and the wreckage of World War I.

I know the book has value, because I enjoyed it last year, and found myself eagerly bent over its pages and emotionally touched this year, but it's definitely not one of my favorites.