Cannery Row - John Steinbeck

On my continued journey through the books of John Steinbeck, I got to Cannery Row. It was a good read, though there were some difficult passages - mainly dealing with harm to animals, and some cultural insensitivities by today's standards. Unlike some of his novels which have a throughline, this is a collection of stories about the characters in Cannery Row - though the focus is on Doc. Here is what Steinbeck had to write about it...

"How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, 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 let the stories crawl in by themselves."

I think that if you are looking for some great character studies, this will be a great read for you. While it was not my introduction to Steinbeck (I believe my first was either Grapes of Wrath, or East of Eden back in High School, of my own choice), I do think it is a good way to read his work. You get a good sense of how he writes, and what types of characters interest him.