Cannery Row

Blogging Meltdown! Red alert! No seriously, Stan's right, I've been lax in my blogging duties. I'll still stand by the excuse that I'm playing the longest video game I have left (which is nearly done). This weekend I took a trip to Lake Winnipesaukee, and knowing that I wouldn't be using my DS at all, I figured it was time to clear out a book- the second half of this Steinbeck combo, Cannery Row. I grabbed (stole) this book from a communal library we share with a few other families last year because of Of Mice and Men, a book I think some of my classmates had to read back in high school. I gave it a shot, and it really had no effect on me. It's hard to call a book that ends with a man shooting a retarded guy in the back of the head bland, but I knew the ending before reading it and nothing else in the book really did much for me. But I held on to it, figuring at some point I'd give Steinbeck another shot and read Cannery Row. I was having some difficulty figuring out what to call Cannery Row's genre; the best I came up with was "Americana." Wikipedia did slightly better with "regional slice of life." The book is made up of a lot of short stories about the lives of several unique citizens living around Monterrey's sardine fisheries. The characters were a little one dimensional, but memorable nonetheless- Mack, the leader of a group of bums who think they're helping out but usually being a pain in the ass; Dora, head of the local whorehouse; Lee Chong, the wacky Asian stereotype grocery owner; and Doc, the straight-man who has to deal with everyone's shit. Eventually a plot starts to form wherein Mack and his bums try to throw Doc a party, but keep fucking up. It leads to Doc knocking Mack out, in probably my favorite scene of the book. On a second attempt the bums get it right, and all ends well. I can see why Of Mice and Men is considered the classic here- it deals with much more complex issues than Cannery Row and has an ending that must have had an impression on people who hadn't already known. But for me, Cannery Row was a simpler but more enjoyable read.