Initial Conditions

Sometimes it’s good to go back and rediscover the books you read at school. Why recently I re-read “Lord of the Flies” (flashback to prep school days) and loved it and “L’étranger” and “La Symphonie Pastorale” remain in my all-time favourites list.

It’s good because English ruins books for you. I hated Lord of the Flies and Of Mice and Men, because I associated them with the chore of finding similes and metaphors and discussing how the writer made the passage humourous (although that didn’t occur in either of those books). Being forgiving, however, I decided to give them both a re-read recently, and this post concerns Of Mice and Men.

Free from the shackles of “If I don’t read this, I’ll fail”, I discovered that Of Mice and Men is a very good work indeed, and were it not for my enormous book backlog, I would seriously consider expanding the “Steinbeck” section of my bookshelf. For those of you not familiar with the plot, it concerns two Californian wanderers, looking to make some money by doing ranchwork here and there, the moving on, in the hope that they can one day get a ranch of their own.

George is the sensible, level-headed fella who takes care of Lennie, a man whose stature and brute force bely his child-like, one track mind nature. Because all poor Lennie wants to do is stay and look after rabbits and stroke other soft, furry things, a habit which leads to the pair becoming travellers in the first place…. and eventually leads them into more trouble later on.

The other characters, with the possible exception of Candy and Crooks (often referred to as the n-word, but I will do no such naughty thing here) are a bit one-dimensional (or seem to be there for a sole reason) but that doesn’t detract from the main point of the story, the plight of the two men trying to find their place in the universe.

Unfortunately, my reviewing skills (?) don’t do his book justice, and if you haven’t read it, please do.

Next up for me is some Camus, though exactly what I have yet to decide. The list of remaining books is:

The myth of Sisyphus by Camus

Exile and the Kingdom by Camus

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel

God’s Undertaker by John Lennox

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

As yet untitled PhD thesis by Andrew Stothers (I know, I made this joke already)