Which books did you read? Which one currently? I love Steinbeck for his characters. They can seem so real. Sometimes in life you meet someone that’s just so unique, such a one-in-a-million type of person and those are the people you find in his novels, especially East of Eden and Cannery Row.

I always giggle thinking about the part in cannery row that starts something like “Henri the French painter wasn’t actually French. His name wasn’t really Henri either. And he didn’t paint”

That book has so much life in it with these little vignettes. I was in Santa Cruz recently and wished I could have made time to visit Salinas and Monterrey but we didn’t get to go. All I know of that area is how he describes it like paradise.

Tortilla Flats was pretty good too. Grapes of Wrath is obviously incredible but it’s kinda like Requiem for a Dream “that was fantastic. I never want to watch it again”

I feel that as an American that he lifts us up. That he puts my country on the map for literature on par with Dickens and Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky. I’m proud to have Steinbeck in my cultural heritage