★★★★★ One of my favorite comfort reads

Cannery Row

John Steinbeck

I read Cannery Row for the first time at the beginning of my teens -- I'm guessing I was thirteen years old, but who knows? Cannery Row and the sequel Sweet Thursday became two of my favorite comfort reads. I read them over and over in high school. I just bought them for kindle and am planning to revisit and see how much difference 50 years perspective makes.

If you're used to such John Steinbeck classics as The Grapes of Wrath or Of Mice and Men, you may find Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday surprising. They are far more upbeat and fun than most of Steinbeck's other works. The characters are still the lowlifes of his other works, but the stories are more about their joys than their sorrows.

I just finished the reread. It is always a scary thing to do, to read an old favorite after fifty years. That is especially true when it was written in the first half of the twentieth century. We definitely raise an eyebrow. However, I was pleasantly surprised. The reason for this, I think, it that Steinbeck reports, usually without judging. Much of what he reports is horrifying, but he doesn't try to pretend that it isn't. If you want to know what the world was like in 1945 (and I do), then it is good to be able to read about it. As always, YMMV.

I have to modify one thing I wrote above. I said, "the stories are more about their joys than their sorrows". While I will stick by that, the difference is not as large as I remembered. There is a lot of sorrow in Cannery Row. There is death, and worse than death. Even with that, it is still a comfort read for me.

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