Cannery Row and Steinbeck

"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 flophouses..."  

                                                                                            - John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

Books!  Ahhh....the smell, opening them, holding them in your hands, marking them and collecting them are all elements of reading books that I religiously embrace.  Classics are my vice but there is something about Hemingway and Steinbeck that keeps me reading and collecting them.  Last time we were in Monterey I hung my head low in pure shame that I had not read Cannery Row.  Then and there I shook my fist to the sky and vowed to the John Steinbeck bust not to let it happen again.  So each night last week I nestled in bed and read Mr. Rogers' copy of Cannery Row, circa his high school sophomore English class.  Steinbeck did not disappoint and it made our trip to Monterey last weekend that much richer as we tried to figure out buildings and locations from Steinbeck's Cannery Row.  Certainly with industrialization, immigration, the Depression, and WWII, the Cannery Row of the first half of the twentieth century stands in sharp contrast to the Cannery Row of today and Steinbeck does a fine job of painting this picture for  his readers.  Definitely not a book for you lovers of female herioines but what can I say, I'm just sort of a Hemingway/Steinbeck kind of girl.