For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway

This had been sitting in a pile of books to read for several years before I got around to it - I think I'd been expecting something dry, violent, macho and therefore hard for me to connect to. To my surprise, it is actually a thoughtful and humane portrayal of one man's experience of the intensity and the futility of desperate guerilla war. There was of course plenty of violence, and I was occasionally alienated by glorifications of hunting and bullfighting, and the portrayal of suicide as cowardly and shameful, but it was very engaging and the writing made me care about the characters.