To begin a new series (I hope) of posts about the books I've read recently, I thought I'd kick it off with an ode to John Steinbeck, my favorite American author. (Inspired in part by Emily's latest blog post. Thanks Emily!)
Like most American teenagers, I read John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath during Honors American Literature my junior year of high school. Well, I should clarify: I read half of Steinbeck's classic tale of the Great Depression and then read the Cliff Notes. Because that's what my crazy, leaf-picking, bird-calling honors English teacher told us to do. Lady was crazy. And not in the good way either.
Needless to say, I did not appreciate Steinbeck then. In fact, I think I've blocked out a lot about the Joad family and their dusty flight from Oklahoma in my mind. It was way beyond my comprehension or my literary maturity at that point. (I was, however, quite enthralled by Emily Dickinson and The Scarlett Letter though.)
I did not reacquaint myself with John Steinbeck until I moved to Monterey. If you know anything about Steinbeck, you know that he was born and raised in Salinas, an agricultural immigrant town some twenty miles from the beautiful bay of Monterey. Many of Steinbeck's novels are set in California--particularly Salinas and Monterey--and they have a very distinctive and almost tangible sense of place about them. To read John Steinbeck is to taste the dirt of Salinas's rolling hills and to smell the salty sea air hanging over Monterey's Cannery Row.
For months after I moved to Monterey in 2005, I would pass this statue of the author along the boardwalk of Cannery Row (now a tourist destination) on my way to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where I volunteered on the weekends. And every week, I would think to myself that I should really read something by Steinbeck, seeing as how he'd written about the very place I was currently living.
So I picked up Cannery Row at the local public library and I fell in love with Steinbeck's prose and the almost effortless way in which he breathed life into the people and the places that he wrote about. In the prologue of the book, which is really a compilation of stories about Doc Ricketts (a real person) and the men who worked in the sardine canneries that give the street its name, Steinbeck essentially tells us how he sets about to capture the world through his words:
"How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise--the quality of light, the ton, the habit and the dream--be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book--to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves."
And since reading those words, I have loved John Steinbeck. And that love was reaffirmed when I read East of Eden while in grad school and which, in my opinion (and his), is Steinbeck's best work and one of the most beautiful pieces of literature written by an American author. It starts rather slowly as a quasi-autobiographical tale of Steinbeck's family, and then it begins to intertwine itself with the tale of Adam Trask and his two sons, Aron and Cal as an allegorical re-telling of the story of Cain and Abel. If you haven't read East of Eden or if your only experience with Steinbeck is your high school reading of The Grapes of Wrath or Of Mice and Men, then I encourage you to read more. You will not be disappointed.
I bought a collection of Steinbeck's most famous works for my birthday. There's only one book in the collection that I haven't read yet (Travels with Charley in Search of America) which is at the top of my to-be-read list but I can't wait to re-read East of Eden or Cannery Row, The Pearl and yes, even The Grapes of Wrath. Maybe now, I'll appreciate it a little more.
Ultimately, I just love the way Steinbeck works with words and how he expects more from his readers. In East of Eden, Steinbeck writes about the way two men, a father and son, read books:
"Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands." (East of Eden, page 280)
And if you read Steinbeck, you can't help but get it all over your face and hands and heart. There's a reason the man won a Nobel Prize for his writing.
And you too may discover the beauty of the word timshel.
Up next, reviews of three of the books that I have read recently. I know you are all sitting on the edge of your seats in anticipation.
