شاهکار فوق‌العاده ای از روابط انسانی و سرگذشت غم انگیز دو دوست کارگر.. نثر نمایشنامه ای و ریتم بالای این اثر بهمراه شخصیت پردازی فوق‌العاده و گیرایی روایت، خوانش اثر رو بشدت لذت بخش میکنه و درنهایت پایان تراژیک کتاب هست که جای هیچ بحثی رو باقی نمیگذاره..

n  n    Book Reviewn  n
4 out of 5 stars to Of Mice and Men, a novel written in 1937 by John Steinbeck. What a heartbreaking book... many students in American high schools read this one around 9th or 10th grade, and it provokes such sensitive topics to be discussed. A quick summary: Lenny and George are drifters looking for work. Lenny is a little slow and has a few disabilities that weren't addressed when he was younger, likely due to time time period (early 20th century) when they had ability to ignore these types of illnesses. Unfortunately, it has disastrous consequences for him and for George. Men can be cruel. So can be women. Lenny tends to hold on to things a little too tightly when he's scared. He's lost a few pets and things he loved, as a result. One day, a woman pushes him a little too far, more than he's capable of understanding, and he reacts in fear. George must find a way to cover it up, and his only recourse is to take his own disastrous actions. No spoilers here, but you probably get the drift already. No matter if you know the end, you still need to read the story to see how people treat one another because they are different or they aren't perceptive enough to understand their own consequences.

This books helps people understand what happens when you lose control. It helps you figure out what you might need to do to protect someone. And it helps show who's (wo)man enough to stand up for others or to sit back and watch bad things happen. It's charged and full of emotion and fear. I struggled a little with some of the secondary characters and the setting, no my favorite. If it were set in a bit more modern times, I might have given this one a 5. But it's absolutely worth reading whenever you have a chance to find a quiet corner and be ready for a bit of a cry and a flood of questions, answers and thoughts.

n  n    About Men  n
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What more can I possibly add to a discussion of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men without drawing a high school English teacher's salary? Considering I'm not drawing bored glances from teenagers, I doubt that a check from LAUSD will appear in my mailbox anytime soon.

-- Published in 1937, this is the work that the Goodreads algorithms seem to have agreed is the author's most renowned. For Stephen King, it's The Shining, for Elmore Leonard it's Get Shorty and for John Steinbeck it's Of Mice and Men.

-- This is a novella, approximate length 34,720 words. I read it in under forty-eight hours.

-- The story revolves around two ranch hands traveling the highways and ranches of California, looking out for each other and trying to build enough of a stake to put down on their own piece of land.

Both were dressed in denim trousers and in denim coats with brass buttons. Both wore black, shapeless hats and both carried tight blanket rolls slung over their shoulders. The first man was small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong features. Every part of him was defined: small, strong hands, slender arms, a thin and bony nose. Behind him walked his opposite, a huge man, shapeless of face, with large, pale eyes, with wide, sloping shoulders; and he walked heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws. His arms did not swing at his sides, but hung loosely.



-- George Milton is the small man, the thinker. Lennie Small is the child in a hulk's body. Walking ten miles to a barley ranch south of Soledad after a bus driver with a grudge drops them off on the highway far short of their destination, Lennie is fascinated by petting mice or rabbits or anything with a nice texture. Lennie has never laid a hand on George, enamored by the tales his traveling partner tells of the land they'll settle someday. When the men finally arrive for work, George does the talking.

"He ain't no cuckoo," said George. "He's dumb as hell, but he ain't crazy. An' I ain't so bright neither, or I wouldn't be buckin' barley for my fifty and found. If I was bright, if I was even a little bit smart, I'd have my own little place, an' I'd be bringin' in my own crops, 'stead of doin' all the work and not getting what comes up outta the ground." George fell silent. He wanted to talk. Slim neither encouraged nor discouraged him. He just sat back quiet and receptive.

-- One of the reasons John Steinbeck is my favorite author is that when he pens description, I don't want it to end, and when he switches to dialogue, I don't want his characters to stop talking either. Stephen King's dialogue can be tin, while Elmore Leonard's attentiveness when it comes to prose is short spanned to say the least, but Steinbeck's descriptions and dialogue achieve a purity that captivates me. It's like the difference between drinking water from a garden hose that's been drying in the sun with who knows what crawling inside it and one day, someone hands you a bottle of Perrier.



-- While most authors have been around people, with Steinbeck, I'm always left with the undeniable impression he watched and achieved a wisdom about people. Then he works that knowledge into his books and passes it along to the reader. I find myself able to relate to Steinbeck more than I can the majority of contemporary authors, who often seem to have never been around humans who dreamed, drank, lusted, got into fights or trouble with the law, fell out with family members or worried about where their next meal might come from.

Crooks said gently, "Maybe you can see now. You got George. You know he's goin' to come back. S'pose you didn't have nobody. S'pose you couldn't go into the bunkhouse and play rummy 'cause you was black. How'd you like that? S'pose you had to sit out here an' read books. Sure you could play horseshoes till it got dark, but then you got to read books. Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody--to be near him." He whined, "A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. Don't make no difference who the guy is, long as he's with you. I tell ya," he cried, "I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick."

-- For those joining late, I'm no English teacher, but if I encountered someone who was adamant that they didn't read fiction (I'm thinking men here) and I wanted to try to get them to change their attitude, Of Mice and Men would be the novel I'd hand them. It's short, it's about men and work and figuring out a better future and loyalty and how things don't always work out the way you dream they will. Yet the writing takes me away to another place. I couldn't last a day bucking barley or bucking a sack of anything, but as Steinbeck knows well, we all yearn to be on the open road, traveling, camping out on a river and maybe eating beans just because we felt like it.

-- Lastly, Of Mice and Men has been adapted to film twice: a 1939 production starring Burgess Meredith as George and Lon Chaney Jr. as Lennie and a 1992 film with Gary Sinise as George and John Malkovich as Lennie. Reading the novel, I heard Sinise's voice as George. As Lennie, I heard the Abominable Snowman from the 1949 Looney Toons short directed by Chuck Jones, The Abominable Snow Rabbit. References to Steinbeck's novel have been dropped by a ton of cartoon series, perhaps as much a tribute to Jones as to Steinbeck, but the homage that stands out for me are the characters of Pinky and the Brain on Animaniacs.

I know...classic, movies, been around for years, greatly respected author, etc., etc., etc. But, nihilism leaves me cold...

Enjoy if it's you...but (and I've used this quote before) this book typifies "life is hard and then you die". Who cares how well the story is written that gets you there.

The very quality of the writing here made the experience worse for me. It has been brought to my attention of late that Steinbeck was a gifted writer. It's true he was, and the message in the story he relates here carries that much more weight. I suppose the bottom line is, I live in the world where pain happens, a lot. I don't really need it here. So, I leave my rating as it is because my experience here remains a 1 star experience. So, as I said for you who love this book, and I know some...I'm happy for you, I don't and I can't really recommend it.

“In every bit of honest writing in the world, there is a base theme. try to understand men, if you understand each other, you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love”

A timeless work of fiction that embraces universal themes of racism, poverty, mental disorder, and friendship that brings with it loyalty and misguided loyalty as Steinbeck delivers yet another powerful story, this time of two men struggling to find work, during the Great Depression in the US. One a gentle giant who ‘kills with kindness’ and the other, George, who takes control of his friend who possesses the mental age of a child, in a bid to find work alongside a migrant workforce who are also in need, flawed and with their own back stories.

The two central characters, George and Lennie, have arrived at a farm in search of work having fled from their previous job because of some minor transgression by Lennie. Conscious of his friend’s mental competence, George becomes Lennie’s voice and with very tightly controlled conversations with others, he encourages his friend to say nothing to anyone they meet. The promise for this compliance is work and the pledge that they will both find a place where rabbits run free!!!.

Words are offered to protect Lennie, “If you jus’ happen to get in trouble like you always done before, I want you to come right here an’ hide in the brush… “ and yet Lennie does get into trouble again as the story takes on a sad twist that will test friendship and expose all the inequalities of a world portrayed by Steinbeck.

Powerful in its message but simple in its storytelling, evocative in its themes and sentimental in its portrayal of all that is wrong at that time in history as people struggled to find work and their next meal. The characterisation is intriguing and the small group of people central to the story is indictive of a society in need, with prejudices, ambitions, with an underlying mistrust of people around them.

Simple and powerful and one of those books everyone should read in their lifetime.

Well I finally got round to reading it, and I’m pleased to say I wasn’t disappointed. Steinbeck’s descriptions are such that you need no imagination. Touching and beautifully written.

John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is a novella (around 72 pages) that focuses on two men in The Great Depression Era. George is a small man while Lennie is the bigger man. They are two farmhands who have a big dream to one day own their own small place. However, George and Lennie have just been run out of town. Is this ranch their second chance? Will George and Lennie realize their dream?

Of Mice and Men is a very dark novella. I mean dark. Steinbeck is a master at setting the scene. He begins each chapter with a few paragraphs about the landscape. This sets an eerie tone, almost like sitting on top of a powder keg.

The character development in this book is really second to none. Many authors will write characters as all good or all bad. However, Steinbeck’s characters are well developed. They are not perfect, and they don’t fit nicely into one mold. That leaves the reader wondering what the character will do because they haven’t been type cast.

Of Mice and Men is chock full of symbolism. George and Lennie are obsessed with The American Dream. However, is it ever attainable? Does society treat people as interchangeable? Are our social safety nets strong and working appropriately?

Do our social safety nets work? Please allow me to answer that question from the US perspective. It is a resounding NO. Here in the United States, we have something called Social Security Disability. If you can’t work because of a disability, you can apply for this program. It takes 3 months just to get someone assigned to your case. That is 3 months without being paid. Only 22% of claims are initially approved. The average process takes 27 months (2-3 years). This is someone who cannot go out and get another job. They are disabled! Who can go 2-3 years without getting paid? Who can not pay their mortgage, their car payment, their medical bills for 2-3 years?

This is a really fun book to talk about in a book club. It was part of the April Readalong. If you want to take a look at our discussion, take a look here.

Overall, I am happy that I read this book. I really enjoyed how Steinbeck set the scene and admire how he was able to set a super creepy tone. This book has some major depth with his use of symbolism. Of Mice and Men is not long-winded. However, this book was a bit too dark for me. Thanks for everyone who participated in the Readalong!

2025 Reading Schedule
JantA Town Like Alice
FebtBirdsong
MartCaptain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
AprtWar and Peace
MaytThe Woman in White
JuntAtonement
JultThe Shadow of the Wind
AugtJude the Obscure
SeptUlysses
OcttVanity Fair
NovtA Fine Balance
DectGerminal

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Drifters, streetwise George and not-so-bright, but big and strong Lennie's ultimate goal is a place they can call home and their part of the American Dream. Steinbeck's understated, and exquisite modern classic set in the valleys and fields of California.

It feels a disservice to have read this famous tome within a single day; but also it shows that how much Steinbeck impacted the world of literature and wider, in a book that just tops 120 pages. A parable on what it is like to be a human being, that will live on forever. 7 out of 12.

2010 read

[Reading other goodreads reviews of this brings home to me that I really was in the classes for kids they'd given up on. I never read Of Mice and Men as required reading assignment.]

Tell us how it's gonna be...

I've never wanted a book to spontaneously change endings so badly. I yearn for that little place as much as they do. I wanted them to have it desperately. Proof the incredibly sad ending isn't hopeless is that on a reread I could still hope it would end differently. Oh, it does happen, loneliness and cruelty and mass mob hating mentality. The possibility that it won't, that people might come through, is still a chance. Otherwise why bother reading a book such as this one.

Lennie dying alone like a dog haunts me. The dying with honor issue I've read about in other stuff isn't an issue with me. Dignity, yes, because in this case the dying was robbing his life of dignity. Lennie had precious little of it as it was. I know that in those times that kind of thing was not unheard of (or much later than that). Still, depressing as shit. Maybe those kinds of hateful things make some kind of a stain on the atmosphere, like a ghost. (If ghosts exist, I imagine they'd come out of something like that. Why are ghosts usually from like Colonial usa or Civil War times? Not the 1970s?) So the dying and the living are the same as both are long over. It should never have to be that way.

Curly's wife haunts me. I related her to Lennie in their inability to think and mourning what happens without any possibility of understanding why. I see in her other abused women and find it heartbreaking and frustrating and reminding.

Of Mice and Men touched on a lot for such a little story. I find that I think of it for comparions when thinking about things like what we owe other people, and expectations of ourselves and others. George's exhaustion of taking care of Lennie, and how everybody else let him down. It's awful to be completely alone, and awful to have to carry so much yourself. Burdens can also make you feel weighted to something. I don't know, I just think about George sometimes. I catch myself being suspicious of what people want, want, want from everybody and those expectations and then I remember George and how it wasn't all bad having someone else to think about like he did for Lennie. It's scary to rely on anyone else. I get why George wanted his little place.

Read this the first time in a middle school science class by holding the book under the desk and ever so slightly ducking my head to read my lap. (Probably as subtle as kids today text messaging.) I had a hard time keeping it together. (Any time they talked about their little place with Candy made me squirm in my seat in excitement.) (I stopped reading books under the desk after that. Did it all the time in elementary school, but for lighter fare like Ramona Quimby series and Dr. Suess.) [I read it on the sly. The smart kids were forced to read it. Maybe those kids were sneaking in The Outsiders inside their textbooks?]

I read this book for the second time and it's one of the most depressing books I’ve ever read. Till now, it’s my favourite Steinbeck book.

Oh God. I want more. I *need* more.

I'm a giant ball of sheer emotion right now, as many people must've been when they finished this story. Dang it, John Steinbeck, how could you do this to us? How could you write something so heart-wrenching, and manage to leave us wanting more?

Maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment...but I can't be the only one who's had such a visceral reaction to this story.

Lennie and George.
George and Lennie.

Two lonely men who live on the fringe of society, desperately clinging to a far off dream that could bring them comfort and stability.

Only a transient, a dirt poor traveler who scrapes their pennies together would know how sad it is to live this way. To live trying to keep your back to the wind, so to speak. To eke out a family from the outcasts, the unwanteds, the forgotten people.

George was given a reason to live, even if that reason was a burden that felt like a cross to bear. His loyalty made him feel responsible for Lennie no matter what, which is the mark of a beautiful soul.

Hope and the death of it.

Or rather, clinging to the last shred of hope lest your dignity dies with it. The loss of dignity or hope is the one thing in life that can cause someone to go 'round the curve of the point of no return, and not look back. To have nothing left to lose is frightening.

And dangerous.

And the responsibility that goes along with that knowledge bravely showed its scarred, ugly face in this touching novella.

4/5

This won't be a "real" review, however I wanted to point out how I read this in Middle School and didn't enjoy it -- and now at 20 years old, I thought it was amazing! They're making kids reads this far too soon, in my opinion.

Regardless, Steinbeck can really write well. I'm going to have to read East of Eden soon!