Braddy Reads The Old Man and the Sea

I don't read nearly as much as I used to. While reading was once a favorite pastime, now I find I would rather spend my idle hours writing or drawing. Creating rather than consuming.

Okay, I still watch hours and hours of cartoons, but those are pretty much a commitment from me by this point.

Anyway, yesterday I found myself taken with the urge to read a good story. I wanted to read something short and easy but not childish. It's a difficult set of criteria to meet, honestly, and I idly and aimlessly browsed the fiction section at the local library. Salvation came in the guise of a thin little volume by the incomparable Ernest Hemingway, that creation most loathed by high school students everywhere, The Old Man and the Sea.

I'd never read it before. My first Hemingway was about two years ago, and I loved it. The Old Man and the Sea was exactly the sort of thing I wanted.

The particular edition I picked up contains a brief introduction which spoils the entire plot in a paragraph written by Hemingway himself, so I started with a feeling of distrust lodged firmly in my psyche. How is Hemingway going to tell the story of a single fishing trip in which exactly one thing of note occurs, make it last 90 pages, and make it interesting? There's no way he can do that.

And, in a sense, that's probably true. I read most of the book while on my way home from work, on the bus, and I fell asleep while reading. A couple of times. Whether that was due to the quality of writing in the book or my own fatigue, though, I couldn't definitively say.  If I'd been a teenager at time of reading, though, I would certainly come away from the book hating the experience.
Thankfully, I'm no capricious teenager. This book amazed me, despite the beddie-byes. It's profoundly introspective and contemplative, all while maintaining that mythic fortitude of manliness Hemingway's known for.
I don't really buy into that myth, but it does make for good reading.
Short story shorter: I loved it. A bit slow at the start, but the ending's gorgeous.