Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Book #52: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

This 105-page novella follows George and Lennie, two migrant workers in 1930s California, as they begin a new job at a ranch. George and Lennie have known each other since childhood, and George kind of takes care of Lennie, who is huge, enormously powerful, and very mentally challenged. They have huge plans for how they're going to eventually save up their money, buy some land, and have a farm together--but as the reference in the book title hints at, their dreams don't seem to have much of a chance of being fulfilled.

The friendship between George and Lennie, as unlikely as it may seem, is the center of the story, and it's obvious that they both really care about each other and always stick together. And this relationship is what is the propelling force through the action of the story--and what makes the ending so hard to swallow, and so sad to read. I knew what was going to happen at the end (I can't help spoiling it for myself and reading the last few pages every time! It's the worst!), but I still felt some serious emotions as I read it. I loved George and Lennie and how they talked, and I loved their simple, unassuming dreams of stability and having a home, even thought their conversations about their dream become extremely bittersweet at the end when it is obvious they'll never happen.

I really liked the genre/style of the book--I've read that it was a novel written in playable format, that people would be able to turn it into a play exactly as it stood. I liked understanding that as I read, because that made the stark, clear style make more sense and I could almost picture it being acted out on a stage.

Thursday, October 8, 2015

Book #51: On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Okay, so here's a confession. I didn't actually finish this book. I read 1/3 of the way through it and after reading some reviews of it, I feel like what I read is representative of the rest of the book and I am not interested in wasting more of my life on this book when there are other, better books I want to read. So I did NOT like this book and I don't really think it's worth the energy.

This book is one of those "top 100" books that make those book lists all the time, because of its place as a defining novel of a certain generation and time in American history. That really is the only reason people recommend it and read it. The writing follows the narrator's stream-of-consciousness and is therefore muddled and really unnecessarily verbose in places. And the story--the story is just a very thinly disguised memoir of Kerouac's travels across America after WWII with his buddies. The narrator, Sal Paradise, follows around the wild and crazy Dean Moriarty around America and they spend their lives just hitchhiking around the country, sleeping with random girls, doing drugs, spending all their money, stealing cars and food, and talking about life. Besides that I fundamentally disagree with their lifestyle and how ridiculous and presumptuous they seem, I found the characters to be super problematic, chauvinistic, and crazily unaware of how horrible they are to everyone around them. I just could not believe how often they just breezed into somewhere, got drunk, hurt other people's lives or even destroyed or ruined them, and then just disappeared and moved on to something else. This is the problem with the ridiculous Beat Generation, hitchhiking and road-traveling lifestyle that the book promotes--if everyone fell to the premises that are shared in this book and started living this way, society would absolutely fall apart with everyone's irresponsible and damaging habits. I really hated the way the characters acted and I really didn't want to read any more. The rest of the book was all exactly the same and there was no need to read any further.

I will say that if I were willing to put in energy into analyzing and studying and actually paying attention to the characters of the book, that I'm sure there are some redeeming and interesting things to learn about the Beat Generation and the mindset of WWII vets and America in general after the war, but I will leave that to other people to do and just assume they're taking care of it.