Last weekend I finished off The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. This book took me a while to finish, but I put that down to reduced reading opportunities, because I really enjoyed it. Like East of Eden, which I read a month or so ago, the characters are really well developed, but the author really has a much more coherent and compelling underlying message in this book, and consequently its much more interesting. Like Eden, the book finishes a little curtly, but I think that's probably an inevitable consequence of Steinbeck's style, in that he really writes about groups rather than individuals, families and classes of people. His contribution is in painting the details of their day-to-day lives, that we might better understand the problems they face, and the story is not so much about their life as their way of life.

Anyway, I really liked this book.