Spoiler alert: I loved it nearly as much today as I did as a teenager. The only difference is it meant a little more back then to me as this was the book that turned me onto literature and reading in general.

Rating: ★★★★★ These were my favorite passages this time around:

• He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
• The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.
• Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky, he thought.
• Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.
• I hope no one has been too worried. There is only the boy to worry, of course. But… many of the older fishermen will worry. Many others too, he thought. I live in a good town.
• “The hell with luck,” the boy said. “I’ll bring the luck with me.”