What more to say about a classic that changed the way we think about the novel and writing and narrative itself? For all its brawl and sharp talk, its drinks and bullfights, notice how some significant scenes occur "off camera," and are related to us only second hand (we never see Cohn beat up Brett's matador lover, we don't see Brett with Cohn when they go off for their love jaunt) but we do learn about it at the same time Jake Barnes - the protagonist - does. Note also that for all of his sexual incapacity (from the war) Jake is able to "pleasure" Brett, if you read carefully. The idea of a hero who is sexually impotent yet in the eye of a sexual storm has its own particular flavor. The tough noir novels that followed and derived from Hemingway (Chandler) owe much to witty repartee and cynical responses to pain and losing the girl. I would almost call this a comic novel if it didn't have darker overtones. Wit and humor are present in nearly every chapter -as if Hemingway wants to tell us something else. As for the hard drinking I am sure some Ph.D. has estimated just how many liters of alcohol flow through the book and how many ccs of alcohol flow through the characters' veins. For those who read this when they were in high school and wondered what the fuss was about, a reread is worth it, keeping in mind how different his writing is to so much of what we read today, the short sentence, the absence of adjectives and adverbs, and the fact that the author almost never enters the minds of his characters but lets the reader infer everything from what is seen and "dialogued." As for the Kindle version, I found no typos or joined words that are sometimes the problem with "kindle'd" books. Much criticism exists on the internet about the "meaning" and the subtext of the book and reading around the text itself does help enrich the experience. That with this writing style, Hemingway shut the door on sentimentality, that his style is hard-boiled, that Hemingway learned from Ezra Pound to "distrust adjectives." In a future book (Death in the Afternoon) he explains his "iceberg" theory of writing: "If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing." Keeping things out causes a pressure on what is left in and the reader can sense and "intuit" the rest of the story.