Steinbeck really was a master of the craft, and this book is further testament to that. It’s the kind of book where I could easily have tabbed out a bunch of stuff on different pages, purely because of how pretty it is. Then again, it’s also a heck of an achievement to translate the bible, and I’m not particularly keen on reading that either.Īnother of the highlights of reading this was the fact that the language itself was so beautiful. It’s a heck of an achievement to write something like this, which is why it’s so famous in the first place. The characterisation was great and the plotting was pretty tight, though it wasn’t necessarily the kind of plot that I gravitate towards, and looking objectively at the book as a whole, it’s easy to be impressed by it. Not bored, but not far off it either.īut there’s some good stuff here, too. I think that might be the problem that I had here – there was too much slice of life stuff, and that kind of left me feeling indifferent.

One of the interesting things about Steinbeck is that I enjoy the way that he handles slice of life stuff, and this whole novel is packed with that. I didn’t exactly not enjoy it, but I also didn’t find myself looking forward to picking it up, either. In fact, I ended up moving it over to become a bedtime book, mainly because it’s a long old read with tiny print. I’m a John Steinbeck fan, having read about half a dozen of his books now, but this one was probably my least favourite.

Steinbeck east of