Dang. I like Steinbeck. Gotta love his endings. You know they are coming if you know anything about foreshadowing, but they still get you. Who will ever forget either scenes in the barn in Grapes and Of Mice? I think Steinbeck had a barn thing.

John Steinbeck is a master writer/author. I enjoyed all of these books. This was a summer of Steinbeck. Grapes of wrath was my final read. East of Eden my first. East of Eden was my favorite by far. But I really like his style of writing and he really makes you feel like you know the era that he is writing in. Grapes of Wrath was sooo sad and amazing. It is hard to believe that people can live like that. We are so blessed to live right now.

I love browsing the small bookstores best, but box sets like this are why I love Amazon.

Grapes Of Wrath:-


It is not easy to read, and I found it easier to see the film and understood better - but therefore all the more I value this work, not because it is difficult but because I could grasp it through the film.

And the film truly was great, especially when it came to the dialogue of mother and son at the end - and Henry Fonda forever marked his place amongst the great with his portrayal and his delivery in the last speech.

It is an entirely worthy, great - in the original sense of the word - work, and for anyone from US it is a must read because it is your own history, usually not told around in the fairy tale account of your country you get officially.

If you are not from US it is still a great work relating a part of history of US, and entirely worthy of reading. Difficult, yes. Great, absolutely.

The book deals with the depression in US that was devastating there, the beginning of an era in Europe that ended with millions killed in war and a sizeable few millions helpless killed by their own government in gas chambers and other ways of murder, and so on.

In all this the poor and the not so poor that became poor in US were almost forgotten, since the nation holds on to the myth that anyone who is willing to work must do well in that country.

This book for one exposes such myths.
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Of Mice And Men:-



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East Of Eden:-


John Steinbeck is not only one of the most famous writers, and generally also a very respected one, but more than anything he transcends often from good writer to a great one. This is one of the works that is evidence of his quality that is at once magical and great both.

East Of Eden rises above the mundane and the unusual, the common and the evil, the different characters that it describes, by the good and the superlative, the aspiring human spirit and the calm, comprehending one; the courage of one and the silent tragedy of another.

It is not just the mirroring of Adam and Charles with slightly skewed images in Aaron and Caleb, and the questionable source of the money fo Adam's father mirrored in the beyond question source of Cathy's - it is the whole lot of people.

Especially Samuel and his whole clan, on one hand, with Adam's chinese housekeeper and cook on the other with his elders who went through years of learning to ponder on a question that had nothing to do with their ancestral culture. And found the answer, too!

It is Olive, with her stoic encouragement of a pilot she thought was in trouble; her sister who spread delight and peace and joy like a delicate but definite perfume in hearts and lives and brought smiles of expectation to those that expected to meet her, and herself died selently of a heartbreak. Another one who married an inventor, who went on trying, at the expense of making money - in fact spending all he had for his experiments.

Samuel's horse who had a grand name because he had nothing else. His wife who cared for her large family with the very little that their land could provide, and did not worry, only worked and provided and organised. Samuel who knew that Adam's Chinese housekeeper was more literate and erudite than his pretense to the contrary for sake of conforming to the local social prejudice, in order to blend into the background.

So many charcters unforgettable - and so many lessons implicit and otherwise.

Of course, one may complain Steinbeck went with the more socially acceptable norm, in depicting evil in the accepted form in prevalent cultural prejudicial terms of Christian and Islamic heritage, by personifying it as a female - while evil rages far more often and far more visibly out there in garb of male gender. Think nazis, think Stalin, think kkk, think paedophiles and other abusers.

But one cannot expect everything from everyone, and if Steinbeck did not rise above all of his upbringing limitations, he was only human.
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The Pearl:-


One of the shortest and yet one of the best of this writer, which is saying a lot. How a poor person who is given a hand by fortune is not allowed to have it by social hounds, until he comes to a decision about what is best for his family.

Gets to heart.

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Cannery Row:-


About the down and out and small fry and the manual labour workers and so forth, and their lives -
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Travels With Charley:-



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read all of them except the pearl loved every page