When I was looking for a book, I was looking for something short to read and have it be on a topic that I find interesting. The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway fit both of those categories seeing that it is only 127 pages long and that it had something to do with a shark attack. I’m really into stories about sailors at sea and shark attacks mainly because of the movie Jaws and watching that as a kid got me in love with sharks and people interacting with them. Jaws definitely created this biased opinion in mind that every shark attack story is to be like that one. Instead of being an intensely thrilling shark attack story like Jaws, Ernest Hemingway bored me with a dull tone and little to no exaggeration. It wasn’t a bad plot, but I think what the book needs is all a little bit more emotion from the characters.

This book was written in 1951, and that may be the reason why I found it not as exciting as the books I have read that are from my generation. The book is set in the 1940s most likely because of the main character’s mension of Joe DiMaggio who played for the Yankees in the 1940’s. 

Hemingway has an old man as the main character who goes on a solo fishing trip. His luck has been bad for the past 84 days where he hasn’t caught a single fish. He ends up hooking a monster of a fish, but he didn’t have the strength to pull him up so he held onto the line for a whole day which turned into two whole days that the old man fought with all his strength left in him. When he killed the fish it created a pool of blood in the water that just welcomed any shark within miles of him. The old man didn’t seem to be much scared of the fact that he was close to death during these shark attacks. It was hard to feel the magnitude of the emotions probably felt by the old man. 

For me, the one main dislike I had towards this book was definitely the tone and how dry the emotions were when they should have been much more interesting to match the interesting tale of this old man. Don’t get me wrong though, I most definitely had things I liked about this book. One thing I really enjoyed was how the author writes the thoughts of the old man talking to himself as actual dialogue in some instances. For example he tells his hand to do something like he’s talking to an actual person, this really conveys the loneliness getting to him and how he starts to become a little insane in his head. 

Although the emotions weren’t as dramatic as I hoped, Hemingway does a great job of describing every detail of what's happening throughout the story. There is so much creative word choice, especially when Ernest Hemingway is describing the physical appearance of the old man in the beginning of the book. It was very hard to understand the tone that Hemingway was trying to establish for the whole book. I feel he established this factual tone due to his simple sentence structure and straight-forward approach. 

Personally, I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I hoped. It definitely depend on what type of person you are because I would recommend this book to someone who only wants something to get their mind off of what’s going on in their life or maybe if you just want a simple, factual kind of novel. Although, it will disappoint the type of person that is looking for a book that will keep them on the edge of their seat when reading.