"The Grapes of Wrath"

The Grapes of Wrath is a great book for someone who is looking for an classic but interesting novel to read.

Steinbeck, John, and Robert J. DeMott. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 2006. (314/460)

My mother recommended The Grapes of Wrath to me when I was having trouble finding a good challenging book for class. She said it’s one of the few classic books that isn’t complicated and is interesting.  I have read Of Mice and Men which is also written by the same author, John Steinbeck, so I decided to take her up on the offer and checked out the book.

At first I was questioning whether I should stay with the book because it started out on the boring side. The author was describing what was happening in the town as if you were on the outside looking in. This was very boring to me because I am not use to reading paragraph after paragraph of description.  As I read further into the book and people started to communicate, the story became more interesting.  John Steinbeck, the author, will sometimes insert chapters in the book that are talking about completely different characters. This confused me because I wasn’t sure what they had to do with the main characters and the family’s move out west. Later in the book though, I found references to these random characters and it made more sense as to why he wrote about it before.

The way the author writes the dialogue between two people is different than what I normally would hear or read currently. Since the story was set back in the 1930’s during the depression, the characters have a different style of talking. It also didn’t help that they were from the south and had a southern accent to go along with it. There are a lot of apostrophes to replace letters and combining of words like “Jus’ tar’d ridin’ in the sun”.  The author also writes some words in the way they are spoken instead of the correct spelling. For example, the word rather is spelled “ruther”. This style of writing makes you slow down when you read instead of quickly going through the pages like you would in an easy book. This writing also makes it more challenging but not to the extent where you don’t understand what they are saying.

So far The Grapes of Wrath is an interesting book. I would recommend it to people who are looking for a challenging classic book but still want it to be interesting.