Oh well, it can’t be helped…

I’ve been making a run at the library lately. Picked up an Agatha Christie novel (A Caribbean Mystery with Miss Marple) a couple of weeks ago on a whim. Took it back not long after I picked up Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers (love the HBO series — have it on DVD and actually hooked the player up the other day to start watching it again). Ambrose’s style in the book is quite simplistic. But he tells a good story with it.

So I went into the library yesterday and ended up looking for Steinbeck. Their collection is embarrassingly small there — maybe five “books,” and two of them are The Grapes of Wrath (and another was a collection that included it). It’s an awesome book to be sure — one of my favorites — but I don’t think it enjoys the demand that it once did. Like in 1940, when it was made into a movie starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad.

The thing about John Steinbeck is that he’s an incredible writer. One of the greatest (top five for sure). And what makes his work so much better for me is that I lived in the Monterey area for five years, and I know the area he speaks of in novels like Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. I’ve been to Doc Ricketts’s lab on Cannery Row.

Steinbeck is a staple of American high school literature classes, but I never remember reading him when I was young. I do remember my sister Gail enjoying him. She had his book, Travels With Charley, (among others I can’t recall I’m sure) and I actually listened to it on tape about 20 years ago. Thing is, one of the tapes was missing. Ironically, the one that included his time passing through Wisconsin…or I assume Wisconsin, because he was heading that way when I had to change tapes, and he was in Minnesota when it picked up again [as an aside, I just found the audiobook on Libby and have checked it out].

Still, knowing that I’d just picked up Band of Brothers and was only a quarter of the way through it, I left Steinbeck on the shelf yesterday. But the call came again today, and in a moment of weakness, and having just skimmed through some of his beautiful writing, I picked up one of the two collections in the library and started reading The Log from the Sea of Cortez, which is all about Doc Ricketts and his work. It’s non-fiction, written by one of the greatest writers of all-time, so it ticks a few boxes for me. It delves into history — things that happened, even if it was something that sounds so boring as an expedition collecting marine samples in the Gulf of California. The introduction is a eulogy to the life of Ricketts, and it’s quite interesting to hear of the man, knowing his importance to Steinbeck and his writing.

So, here I am, and I suppose it can’t be helped. On to read another bit of fascinating literature. I’m already not disappointed just thinking of it. And I’ll make it. Don’t worry.