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Cannery Row is my 5th novel by John Steinbeck and while I enjoyed the read it isn't a standout novel for me like East of Eden or Of Mice and Men and I think this is down to the way in which the book is written as it lacks a plot and reads more like a character study as we get a snapshot of the characters daily lives on Cannery Row.
I really liked the setting of the novel. Published in 1945 it is set during the Great Depression in Monterey California on a street lined with Sardine Canneries known ...more
I really liked the setting of the novel. Published in 1945 it is set during the Great Depression in Monterey California on a street lined with Sardine Canneries known ...more
5★
“It is a time of great peace, a deserted time, a little era of rest. Cats drip over the fences and slither like syrup over the ground to look for fish heads. Silent early morning dogs parade majestically picking and choosing judiciously whereon to pee.”
Cannery Row, where the smelly, noisy business of canning fish takes place and where people settle in ramshackle, makeshift structures to live their lives amongst their fellows. The men and women, Mack and the boys, Dora and the girls, Doc, Lee C ...more
“It is a time of great peace, a deserted time, a little era of rest. Cats drip over the fences and slither like syrup over the ground to look for fish heads. Silent early morning dogs parade majestically picking and choosing judiciously whereon to pee.”
Cannery Row, where the smelly, noisy business of canning fish takes place and where people settle in ramshackle, makeshift structures to live their lives amongst their fellows. The men and women, Mack and the boys, Dora and the girls, Doc, Lee C ...more
Steinbeck's writing is a wonder, he is the master of word usage, turn of a phrase and just downright fantastic writing. Cannery Row, by the time one is done with this novel they have a clear and concise picture of the cannery business, the denizens who make up the populace of the row and even the life and activity in a tide pool. Everything is imbibed with a sense of wonder, humor and a wisdom that is not often enough conveyed in writing. Unbelievable in such a short novel and I am in awe of thi
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One of Steinbeck’s best, but too short! Again Steinbeck draws a picture of a time and place that will remain a vivid portrait. This time it is a derelict area in Monterey, California. Probably the 1920s, although it is not said. There are T-Fords, it is on this I am guessing. Steinbeck was from Salinas, California, so he is writing about what he knows best: a cannery, the sea, its smells pungent, acrid and salt, the octopi and starfish and rattlesnakes and the rats, the sound of the surf, the fe
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This is a character study of a place, Monterey in the early 1930s. There is just the thinnest line of a plot on which to string the various people and places that populate the neighborhood. Steinbeck makes the reader love these drunken, sometimes violent, social misfits because he recognizes their humanity.
3.5 rounded up because it's John Steinbeck after all.
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I really enjoyed this quick little book. The main character of the story is not a person, but a place: cannery row in Monterey, California. Steinbeck uses beautiful description, character sketches, and scenic vignettes to give a wonderful picture of life in that community in the 1930s. The result is sometimes funny (Doc's beer milkshake, using frogs as currency, 21 tomcats in a cage as a gift for Doc), sometimes tragic, and sometimes simply just the truth about a community's struggle to survive
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I read this for a book club. I finished it shortly before the discussion tonight. I thought it was an okay book. I'm much more used to plot driven rather than character driven stories, so it was out of my usual reading comfort zone. After the discussion I appreciated this even more. The characters are people that I wouldn't ordinarily talk to, but you find them to be very endearing.
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Oct 09, 2009
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