I’d like a banana, I thought this morning as I got up from the breakfast table.

Then I noticed a banana skin in the sink. I’d just eaten a banana?  I forgot?  Really?

Ah… welcome to this part of life, when you’re making notes about notes you made to yourself.  When you’re drawing a blank on your daughter’s married name.

Impossible!

Possible.

Though the name does come back, by which time you’ve managed to berate yourself for forgetting.

I’ve never enjoyed re-reading a book or re-watching a movie. But that’s changed now, perhaps because my memory is less reliable, to put it gently. When I read a book or watch a film I’ve seen before, it’s almost a new experience.

I just finished re-reading The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. What an epic! I remembered the plot only vaguely. It’s the ambitious and compelling story of the Price family—parents and four girls—who go to Africa because their father is a missionary, but he’s clueless and insufferable. They’re the only white people for several hundred miles, and the women are transformed by the experience.

I felt sad when I reached the last of 527 pages, so caught up had I become with the four sisters and their mother. (Hang the obtuse and insufferable dad)

I particularly enjoyed the young sister, Rachel, who gets expressions wrong in a delightful way, like: “never the train shall meet,” and “all the teeth in China.”  Everyone in her family, though, knows what she means.

Just before The Poisonwood Bible, I’d re-read all of Hemingway’s novels, and I expect I’ll read them again. His writing is so compact that each word matters, like every note in a symphony. And his books are exciting to the mind, even when they’re about something I don’t remotely care about, like bull fighting, which he considers an art.

He once said, “Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death,” and later wrote: “The only place where you could see life and death, i.e. violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.”

I fail to see how violent death is simple. Do you?

Hemingway is the king of short phrase:  “Manuel walked toward the bull. The bull looked at him. His eyes were quick. The bull would not charge. Manuel could do this.”  The quick, short phrases create a rhythm that propels you through the pages.

I did not think I would care for his last novel, The Old Man and the Sea, but from the first words, I was—let’s say—hooked. “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky…”

I’m wondering, now, where can you go, after reading Hemingway?

For me, it was Edith Wharton, who wrote novels with unique and memorable characters, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1920 for The Age of Innocence. But I  find her most enjoyable book to be The Custom of the Country, about a self-involved young beauty, Lily, who attempts to reach the highest levels of society at any cost. Wharton makes us care for Lily at the same time that we’re dismayed by her plots and values. Will she learn, from what she ultimately suffers?

Now I ask you, dear reader, where might I turn next? What have you read—or watched—that you loved?