Following my epic trek through Gormenghast I wanted to read something that wouldn't take a month to finish, so I picked up Ernest Hemingway's collection of stories, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, which I bought as part of a set from the Book People some time ago.
Within 2 days I'd finished all 18 shorts, and now a week later I'm hard pressed to remember much about any of them. The title story is probably the best and most memorable. It has a protagonist who's dying on the mountain of title, regretting not writing down his past experiences. And that's it really. Hemingway uses very sparse prose, gets swiftly to the point and so the stories fairly rattle along.
The rest of the stories seem to share the same protagonist, Nick, but involve different locations and characters, so they don't really follow on sequentially. Each one begins with a couple of paragraphs in italics too, which appear to link across each story. The book didn't leave much of an impression, but it was a nice easy read to mark time after Gormenghast and before I went away on holiday with 2 new books.
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