It’s an interesting one …

Pick a classic someone else in the club has read from our big review list. Link to their review and offer a quote from their post describing their reaction to the book. What about their post makes you excited to read that classic in particular?

I was still thinking about it when I read JoAnn‘s post The Old Man and the Sea Revisited.

Now I must confess that I had always thought as Ernest Hemingway as someone who was a great author, but not an author for me. But as I read I began to have doubts.

I disliked ‘The Old Man and the Sea’. An old man and a big fish? Come on. Neither could possibly be considered interesting subject matter for a fourteen or fifteen year old girl. In the end though, I did the required reading,  complained bitterly about being bored, wrote the requisite essay, and promptly
forgot all about it.

Saturday’s anniversary seemed to be a sign. I pulled the book from the shelf …

Is this really the same book I read in high school? How did I totally ignore the  beauty in the simplicity of Hemingway’s prose? Was I not touched by the boy’s  devotion to the old man? Did I miss the old man’s respect for the fish, or have  I simply forgotten? And what about the old man and his struggles to overcome  physical limitations?

Now I was born by the sea. I live by the sea. I work by the sea; in a harbour office where I deal with fishermen and boat owners every day.

Maybe this was a book I should read.

I consulted the list, and I found that Charlotte had read ‘The Old Man and The Sea’ for the Classics Club.

I love her blog, I trust her judgement, and so I had to read her post.

She had found the loveliest cover.

Designed by Chris Wharton

And what she wrote convinced me that this was, in all probability, a book that might speak to me.

If you’d asked me to read a hundred pages about fishing, I would have laughed. But Ernest Hemingway’s hundred pages about fishing are like nobody else’s. ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ is a literary work of genius where Hemingway shows himself to be a master of his craft.

The story is mostly told by the old man speaking aloud to himself, and the fish, and is very descriptive about the tides, the lines, the bait. I was surprised at how interesting it all was – I love being by the sea but fishing is never something that has struck me as interesting before. I think it’s a testament to the skill of the storyteller

That confirmed what I knew already. Another book that I must read …

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