/lit/ - Literature

>>22512991
>Grapes of Wrath
Why didn't you like it? It's another book I read again recently (I've just going through and re-reading American classics lately. Currently on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer), and it was far better than I remembered it being. I haven't read anything else by Steinbeck, not even Of Mice and Men, but if The Grapes of Wrath is considered to be one of his worst novels, then I can't wait to dig into Cannery Row and East of Eden. He really has a way of, similar to Mark Twain, just taking a magnifying glass to the most mundane things and making them pop. I know there are plenty of people who find his prose dry and lifeless, but for me, it really brings me into the story like I'm right there in the room with Steinbeck listening to him recount the Joads' journey from Oklahoma to California. I also came away from that re-read with a whole new appreciation for the silly, broken faith of Jim Casy, and shockingly enough, his death affected me in a way I never would've expected from a novel I used to hate so much. God, I felt more charged with emotion then, reading that scene than I have reading any other book in a long time. In some ways, I even find Steinbeck now to be a better Hemingway as far as his prose goes. And, rather than Mark Twain — and of course this is coming from someone who has only read The Grapes of Wrath — I think that Steinbeck portrayed the American family, life, philosophy, and so on more faithfully than anyone else. I will say that my appreciation of this book has probably been aided tremendously by the time I've spent reading American history over the past couple years, so if you haven't taken a deep dive there yet, I'd highly recommend doing so.
>A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.
>In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the Children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream. And it might be that a sick child threw despair into the hearts of twenty families, of a hundred people; that a birth there in a tent kept a hundred people quiet and awestruck through the night and filled a hundred people with the birth-joy in the morning...Every night a world created, complete with furniture- friends made and enemies established; a world complete with braggarts and with cowards, with quiet men, with humble men, with kindly men. Every night relationships that make a world, established; and every morning the world torn down like a circus.