A few hours ago, I finished Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. Talk about a novel that has built up for me over the years, and NOT in a good way. Everyone that I've ever talked to about it that has actually read it, has told me it is the most boring, anti-climactic piece of shit on the planet. Well, to tell the truth, it wasn't that bad. Thankfully it was only 93 pages, and this edition had pictures! Now, if I had had to put up with hundreds of pages of it(which believe me, with this project I've already had my fair share of boring and I'm sure there's plenty more where that came from), then I might be whistling a different tune, but it was a pretty quick read, and an easy way to move myself up into 29 Pulitzers(I have two more Pulitzers from the library that are waiting for me, so yet again, we'll be tied on the lists pretty soon). I'm not a huge fan of Hemingway. I guess I just don't see why he's SOOO GREAT. I mean, really, they even gave him a Nobel Prize for his "contribution to literature." His style is so simplistic, which I guess works for some(obviously not me), which makes it easy to read, but I don't find him very engaging at all. Even A Moveable Feast which I read in the hopes of having a great food memoir combined with narratives about Gertrude Stein and her lover Alice B. Toklas was a bit disappointing. There are some great descriptions of Paris, but I find Hemingway to be extremely, well, MALE, and not something easy to relate to for me. I suppose it doesn't help that Hemingway is one of an ex-roommate of mine's favorite authors, so every time I read him(which thankfully isn't often)I'm reminded of her. I find a lot of hopelessness in Hemingway's characters, including the title character in The Old Man, or hope that is extinguished in some way. In the case of The Old Man and the Sea, this guy is trying to bring in this mammoth of a fish, the Moby Dick of marlins, overcoming physical impediments due to his age, only to lose his prize to sharks at the very end(I'm not spoiling it, who out of the three people that read this blog is ACTUALLY GOING TO READ THIS BOOK, especially when I just gave you the jist), hauling into the Cuban coast a skeleton of the majestic fish, I guess a metaphor in itself for the old man himself, who was at one time a strong able-bodied fisherman. I spent most of, if not all of the book looking for some kind of a deeper meaning, because there HAD to be more to the novel than just a guy on a boat fishing. Which of course there is, it is an elongated metaphor for life struggle and the hopelessness in that(I don't believe it, but remember, Hemingway did end his own life). I don't have much more to say about Hemingway except for that now, I don't have to read anything else by him unless I want to.:) GG's 31, PP's 29.