Easy to re-visit the Ernest Hemingway novel, “The Old Man and the Sea.”

It’s short. The writing is compelling. Just start reading the first sentence and in a snap the first page has been read and snap-snap the entire book is read again.

The story is a classic. A parable of life. An old man fighting for life, refusing to be anything but alive, no matter the sharks in the water that will take a life or a livelihood.

Other Hemingway novels do not have the easy, clear call to pick them up again and again, the call to crack their covers and enter the world of terse sentences and tough lives.

Doesn’t mean one shouldn’t whether it’s 10 years ago or 50 years ago, or even nearly 30 years ago as the yellowed pages of my copy of Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not” attests.

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall starred in the movie version and kicked off their December-May Hollywood romance. Their attraction smoldered from the black-and-white screen.

But in the book, the relationship between Harry Morgan and his love is a complex thing, dually fragile and strong. Whereas Bogey and Bacall burn the screen with their romantic tension, Hemingway creates a far more subtle and emotional relationship.

Harry captains a fishing boat. A combination of the Depression and a wealthy charterer skipping out without paying leaves Harry desperate. To support his family, Harry becomes a smuggler, taking contraband from Key West to Cuba.

The book resonates with the Keys and Cuba, locations that are part of the biography and legend of Hemingway himself. Places that are more iconic because he lived in these places rather than just wrote about them.

“To Have and Have Not” is a longer book than “The Old Man and the Sea” but not by much. It’s another page-turner. Another volume that can grab a reader with the first few lines. Another story, that is far less one-track than “Old Man” but can have a reader quickly starting and finishing it on a rainy afternoon.

Whether it’s a first read or the 30th or a visit again after 10, 50 or 30 years.