One of the struggles with The Black Laser Reads is to find material that feels modern. It’s really easy to find old-fashioned texts with too many semicolons, but the nature of copyright law means that recent materials are pretty rare. Just the nature of time, I suppose.
To my surprise, the original 1924 version of Ernest Hemingway’s first “novel” In Our Time came into the public domain a few years ago. It’s not really a novel, more of a collection of vignettes. I wouldn’t even call them short stories. They’re at most a couple pages long. But here is a piece of writing with a distinctly modern feel and which presents a new challenge for my narration skills.
I think I gave it a different feel, too. It was nice to read something where I didn’t have to worry about running out of breath mid-sentence. I hope you enjoy listening.
The text for this episode came from Project Gutenberg. If you are interested in reading In Our Time yourself, you can download a public domain e-book here.
Next time on The Black Laser Reads: something distinctly unmodern.
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