I ditched Jack Kerouac’s novel. I found myself having to give too much effort to read it. It is well written in that it does a great job of describing events, but at 65 pages in, it was meandering with no apparent point. I stumbled upon Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea on a shelf in a place I was staying at in Newport Beach. It was a really easy read. I have started a Hemingway novel before and lost interest. I believe the novel was Death in the Afternoon. Perhaps I did not enjoy it because I have no interest in bullfighting. That aside, I really enjoyed The Old Man and the Sea in a Tom Hanks’ Cast Away sort of way. There are really only two characters – the old man “Santiago” and a younger fisherman’s helper just referred to as the boy. A great deal of the story is just the Cuban fisherman, Santiago, on his small skiff out in the ocean. I found it amazing that Hemingway could create such an interesting story with so little in terms of character and setting. This was a very short book – about 125 pages and I read it in just three sittings. Anyone who enjoys the ocean would probably love this book.