Tuesday morning, 3 a.m.

I've hit the hypomanic high that happens when one finishes a good book.

No, wait. That's not true. "Hemingway's Boat" is more than good. It's great. It is, in fact, the best book I've ever read on the Papa saga. That's no hyperbole.

It's 3 a.m. as I write this. And now I'm alive, full of ideas, ready to write, ready to read. Which is a good thing because I received word today a book proposal I've submitted was accepted! But, more on that later.

Minimized in the right corner of my Mac are three articles. One is a 2004 New Yorker profile of the just-retired knuckleball Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield. Another is a New York Times piece on CBS correspondent Lara Logan. The third is "Goodbye to All That," Joan Didion's 1967 elegy to New York. I just now had to put down the next book in my queue, "Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines A Life" by Ann Beattie. It's weird, but it's literate. I'll keep reading.

Now I'm starting to feel the crash, brought on by exhaustion, by the lateness of the hour, by the final remnants of illness.

Some take drugs. Others jump out of planes. Me? I read books. I listen to music. I watch movies. I write. I dream. I love.

Time to sleep.

'Hemingway's Boat'

Longtime friends and anybody who's wasted any time here at Pull Up a Chair can you tell you how much I admire the writing of Ernest Miller Hemingway.

You know why. Economy of language. When he was good, he was brilliant. (When he was bad, he was boorish, but that's a different story.)

Anyway, I'm reading a new book, "Hemingway's Boat" by Paul Hendrickson. Saw it at Barnes and Noble and checked it out from the library.

Good stuff. The author is taking a unique approach, using Hemingway's beloved boat The Pilar to frame a narrative around Papa's loves and losses from 1934 until his 1961 suicide.

I awoke with a start about 4:30 a.m. Picked up the book.

Just finished a heartbreaking chapter about Arnold Samuelson, a would-be writer who spent a little more than a year as a caretaker for The Pilar in Key West as a young man. He never quite recovered.

Frustrated as a writer, obviously suffering from bipolar disorder, Samuelson lived out the remaining years of his life as the local eccentric in a small Texas town called Robert Lee. He sold a couple of stories to magazines during his life, but barely talked, even to his family, about his brief friendship with Hemingway again.

Hendrickson includes a quote from Scott Fitzgerald that sent shivers up my spine:

"A writer not writing is practically a maniac within himself."

After his death, Samuelson's daughter discovered a yellowing manuscript that detailed her father's stint on Hemingway's boat. It was published in 1984 as "With Hemingway." It's next on my reading list.

Hendrickson writes with both a fresh approach and a lively voice. I never thought I'd ever again find a nonfiction work about Hemingway that would get me all giddy.

Congratulations, Paul. I'm losing sleep over your fine work. And loving it.