Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Has anybody here read it? I never had, I'd heard briefly about it, and having read Steinbeck's book East of Eden and making it part of the way through Grapes of Wrath, I decided to check it out and give it a try.

Part of what drew me to it was, I watch the show Highlander and during the two most famous episodes with the 4 Horsemen who are reuniting to take over the world...Richard Ridings (who some of you may remember as Angelo the smartass at the bar from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) played a character called Silas who gives off the air of being a dumb brute. He's the biggest, he's the most intimidating, but his two passions seem to be animals and killing people. And during a special feature with the cast and crew talking about the episodes, the show's star and director of that episode, Adrian Paul, compared the character of Silas to that of Lennie in Of Mice and Men. Having only read the first chapter so far, I find that a bit insulting to Silas' character because he wasn't stupid, whereas Lennie comes off as being I guess the term would be mildly retarded. But I digress, one of Steinbeck's shorter books, don't know if it'll be one of his better ones, but after reading the language in the first chapter alone, I am surprised that they had Snoopy reading this book in an episode of The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show, but then again they were more daring in the 80s with children's television than they are today.

Read it about 40 years ago. Very sad.

Great book. But, like Al, read it years ago.

I read it while I was in high school, and that has been a long long time ago.

Suzi wrote:I read it while I was in high school, and that has been a long long time ago.

Lucky, I never had any books to read in high school, no more book reports once the 8th grade was over, and I never got any of the good ones to read. I got stuff I could not get into, Around the world in 80 Days, Wuthering Heights, etc., never Animal Farm or Brave New World or The Catcher in the Rye, the Diary of Anne Frank, nothing. All of those I had to seek out on my own and during my spare time, but maybe I liked them better and had more interest in them because they WEREN'T a part of the mandatory curriculum.

In high school the only book I remember being forced to read was Lord of the Flies and I hated it. The book I gave reports on from the 5th grade through my high school years was Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson. I read a great deal for pleasure. Of mice and men was one of the books in the school library that some of the parents wanted out of the school library, because unmarried people were sleeping together. They also wanted to get rid of the Tarzan books because of the same for Tarzan and Jane. Really I was shocked because one of the things I still a=m so grateful to my beloved grandmother was she never censored my reading. As a result I read well above my grade level throughout school.

I'd never heard about that one, wanting to ban Tarzan because he and Jane weren't married? That's a new one on me, though it does remind me of something I was thinking earlier tonight.

Through history there have been people trying to ban all kinds of books for various reasons, if the characters drink, if they're lewd, if they have sex, if they're violent, etc., but at the same time all of this stuff is in movies, sometimes tenfold and NOBODY tries to ban that, nobody tries to censor that, not REALLY, just take a look at the stuff they get away with playing on the cable channels today, even in the mornings.

But remember I was in high school in the 50's, it was a much different time than today. When I was 5 my grandmother took me to get a library card, in those days most parents would stipulate that their kid was only to read at their age or grade level. So the librarians would not allow a child to read beyond that level. There were no restrictions on my card as a result I was always reading above my grade level. I had read all the Nancy Drew Mysteries in the 3rd grade, my friends didn't get to them until jr and sr high school. I read all of Pearl Bucks books in the 5th grade, as well as Ramona then. It also meant I never read the so called children's classics until I had children of my own and read the books to them. I missed something by not reading Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn until then.

I didn't read Tom Sawyer until I was 13, and I still ain't gotten around to reading all of Huckleberry Finn yet. Those also weren't assigned in school, and I didn't go to the library for the first time until I was 13. Now the reason I was interested in Tom Sawyer was because as a kid I saw Wishbone do a two-parter on it. Wishbone by the way incase you're not familiar with it, a lot of people aren't anymore, it was a PBS show about a Jack Russell Terrier who imagined himself in classic literature, Tom Sawyer, Robin Hood, Phantom of the Opera, Rip Van Winkle, Sleepy Hollow, The Time Machine, etc., and it was a big hit in the 90s and got a lot of kids interested in reading and in reading the classics, so much applause to Wishbone for contributing to the 90s readers.

But I digress, my mother was going through stuff on the shelves one day and found her brother's copy of Tom Sawyer, it was old, it was falling apart, and the two of them weren't even on speaking terms at that time so she threw it in the trash. I had never read it before so when she wasn't looking I stole it out of the trash and took it up to my room and spent about a week reading it and now I have that same dilapidated copy in my trunk for safekeeping. I loved that one, and I don't know if it would've been any different if I'd read it earlier than that or not, but I'm glad I didn't wait until later on. But I also did not read a lot of kids' books when I was a kid, and I don't have kids yet, so I'm making up for lost time now.

I love looking through the children's books at the library because a lot of them are older and so they have the good stuff...they have about a half dozen Alfred Hitchcock books for kids, not counting the 3 Investigators series, and these are from the 60s, somebody apparently got interested in them because 2 weeks ago they were all checked out, now I've got them and I'm currently reading Alfred Hitchcock's Solve them Yourself Mysteries. A sign of the time I'm sure because you wouldn't see anything like this done for kids today.

Suzi wrote:In high school the only book I remember being forced to read was Lord of the Flies and I hated it. The book I gave reports on from the 5th grade through my high school years was Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson. I read a great deal for pleasure. Of mice and men was one of the books in the school library that some of the parents wanted out of the school library, because unmarried people were sleeping together. They also wanted to get rid of the Tarzan books because of the same for Tarzan and Jane. Really I was shocked because one of the things I still a=m so grateful to my beloved grandmother was she never censored my reading. As a result I read well above my grade level throughout school.

In our high school, Lord of the Flies was assigned reading to the lower Freshman class. Not that they were below average...just there was the regular one, then the advanced one. And since I hear so much about that book as an adult, I really am curious why the advanced English class did not read it.

Piggy