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East of Eden by John Steinbeck

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CBR15  Passport California There were two types of literary genre that were particularly popular in the 1950s.  One was Biblical tales, and the other was multi-generational drama, particularly set in the West.  Examples of the first type are plentiful.  The Silver Chalice, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, and Quo Vadis, to name a few.  The second type was exemplified by novels such as Giant and Sometimes a Great Notion.  One thing all these novels had in common was that they were made into prestigious, best-selling movies.  […]

I have nothing new to say about an 85 year old book, unsurprisingly.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

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John Steinbeck grew up in the first decade of the 20th century on some of the most fertile soil in the world, and as a teenager he spent his summers working on nearby ranches. More than 20 years later, he used these experiences to inform the story that would become this novella. Of Mice and Men is about two migrant workers, George Milton and Lennie Small, fleeing one farm and looking for work at another. Lennie is large, strong, and mentally disabled and George is […]

Tom Joad needs a bath

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

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“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, he is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath have stored…” Were you oblivious like me that these were the words in the first line of the Battle Hymn of the Republic? I’m not sure if these are the same grapes Steinbeck is referring to, but there is enough wrath in the world to go around, whether it’s the wrath of the Union army during the Civil War or the wrath […]

John Steinbeck (1)

Burning Bright by John Steinbeck

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“The canvas walls of the dressing tent were discolored with brown water spots, green grass stains and grey streaks of mildew, and the prickles of sun glittering came through.” This is a book I bought and almost immediately regretted because the more I looked at it and thought about it, the less I wanted to read it. It reminds me of a weird mix of the Christopher Isherwood/Aldous Huxley book “Jacob’s Hands” mixed with a Thornton Wilder play. It says it’s a play in stories. […]

End of Year 1

The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

Hamlet's Enemey by Theodore Lidz

Killing Floor by Lee Child

The Client by John Grisham

God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens

The Uplift War by David Brin

Monkey by Wu Cheng'en

Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard

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The Winter of Our Discontent – 4/5 This is John Steinbeck’s last novel and it begins with our narrator, Ethan Allen Hawley, trying to reckon with what it’s like to have once had money and then not to. He’s a veteran who came home to find his father had squandered the family fortune to make a risky investment (war profiteering) that didn’t pan out. So now a while on, married with two kids, Ethan works out a grocery store for an Italian ex-pat. He’s offered […]

Grab Bag

Madame Maigret's Friend by Georges Simenon

The Undiscovered Self by Carl Jung

The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin

The Art of Controversy by Arthur Schopenhauer

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

Inspector Cadaver by Georges Simenon

Mrs Bridge by Evan Connell

The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson

Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut

The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck

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Madame Maigret’s Friend – 4/5 Stars I liked this Maigret more than a lot of others I’ve read. Our mystery involves someone being arrested with a bloody coat hanging in his closet and the burnt remains of a body in his furnace. HIs lawyer maintains that he’s completely innocent of any wrongdoing (including questioning whether or not it’s actually known for sure that wrongdoing has occurred) because of the failure to link physical evidence to the crime. This becomes a bit of a musing on […]



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