Ernest Hemingway is a bit like Marmite: people either love or loathe him. Like Marmite, I’m somewhere in the middle. I can see both sides and am relatively indifferent however I’m starting to get sucked into his writing of late.

What I find bizarre is that the conversations between his characters seem so ridiculous when read, but if you were to transfer them to screen it would flow almost perfectly. There is so little decoration of dialogue – he attempts to show rather than tell, as all good writers do – you have to work out for yourself that this character is indignant, angry or excited. The only direction he gives to the reader in the first dozen chapters of Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises about a character’s state of mind that I spotted this morning was that “she was drunk”.

The writing isn’t as dreamlike as I prefer, but it’s growing on me. It forces a reading between the lines that resonates with my way of thinking a little more than many others. But even so, it’s Great Literature, and we all know how awfully pretentious that is really, don’t we?