Sean's Book Club (eat it Oprah!!) or Reading Something about what I Read

Are you excited? Do you gots the jittery jitters? Is your heart skipping beats and lubbing when it should dub? Did you wake up this morning and say quite sanely to yourself, "Wow, my life is just way to sensationally sensational and maybe I need to take it down a notch and tuck in to some borderline stimulating dialogue about a 60 year old book." Well that's just strange. Nobody would say that. But as it happens, your odd infatuation with the mundane fits perfectly with the following. Thank you for taking the time and allowing me to take you away.

For Christmas I was very happy to receive the novella "The Old Man and the Sea." Here it is in rebus form...

This book of course is considered to be a classic. And not a classic like "Aw dude that story about you getting that giraffe to take ecstasy is classic," but more like the literary kind. Like this book was the "Avatar" of 1952. It was like crack to the book reading world which, as it turns out, was quite the demographic. I think it spanned every human to various pond life. There wasn't a bunch to entertain people back then. I guess wearing hats kept them busy. Television had one and a half channels and broadcast for approximately 14 minutes a day. Pretty slim pickins. Anyway, I digress.

This book here, of course written by the legendary Ernest Hemingway, was something I had always wanted to get my peepers to get to peeping. I've read many a classic novel before and have almost tended to gravitate towards them, so to get one that is only 127 pages and about the size of an ambitious take-out menu meant I could knock another one off in an evening. However, this story, as simple and unpretentious as you can imagine, held me tight for a good two hours. Engaging and entertaining, it explored such simple themes so simply it became elegant and engrossing. I won't go into the plot now because you should read it. It's light fare that will leave you satisfied and definitely remembering why you love to read in the first place. Just be ready, if you read it in public, for randoms to smugly ask you if you are taking a class or writing a book report. Nobody reads anymore. Just smile politely. You will own them someday.

This book, according to the back-cover, won Papa all kinds of awards. He won the Pulitzer, the Nobel, MTV's Best Kiss, and others. So maybe it's not the "Avatar" of that year but it's still essential reading. I know people have their own tastes and what not but this is what writing was. When simplicity created stories and themes were subtle but hard-hitting. Where you didn't need excitement in every sentence to create literature (I'm looking at you Dan Brown). You used your head. And it was good.

So I copped out in my first book review by picking a classic but so what. I had to start slow. I'm reading Vonnegut now so we'll see where that takes me. But either way, read this if you haven't. It's quick, painless, and entertaining. If anything you can cross it of your list. But, you don't have to take my word for it.