Cannery Row
I've read this a few times and it's one of my favourite books. A brilliant mix of philosophy and a heart felt observation of the human condition and down right hilarious in parts. Such beautiful characters you feel like you know them. It's food for the soul and the possibly the best opening paragraph written in some ways summing up the whole book if not Steinbeck's works. It's on a par with Pride and Prejudice's first sentence for humour. A short book that can be read and read again and I'm sure enough has been written about Steinbeck so I'll simply give a taster...
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.” Simply beautiful.
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