Books

The Pearl 

Steinbeck tells the story of a poor father who finds a valuable natural resource and loses a great deal as a result. 

This book reminded me of why, after reading The Grapes of Wrath, I wrote Steinbeck off as a hack for a decade. 

The prose is more florid in this book, with flashes of brilliance, but an intolerable baseline cringe factor. 

The overt political message is so exhausting that I couldn’t even empathize with the human experience related in it. 

Exquisite books by Steinbeck:

East of Eden
Of Mice and Men 

Great book by Steinbeck:

Cannery Row

Bad books by Steinbeck:

The Grapes of Wrath 
The Pearl 

I haven’t read any of his others and I had such a bad experience with The Pearl that I’ll probably take another decade off.

Darkness at Noon

Former Soviet Party superstar languishes in prison while awaiting execution by the Soviets. 

Not recommended. 

These people are just the worst. The book is largely an assertion along the lines of “us old Bolsheviks were making good progress toward trying real communism and then these Stalinist thugs came and ruined it.”

Which is, of course, stupid on its face. 

Soviet thinking had all the worst vices of religious thinking and none of its virtues. It’s so exhausting to listen to the performative rhetoric competition. “How far can I distort my worldview? Did you distort your worldview enough to escape the KGB death squads?”

There’s pretty much nothing else to this book. 

Warning: I’m going to block anyone who shows up in the replies defending any flavor of Marxism, Bolshevism, Stalinism, etc.

Silly me. I spent last 30 years believing it's one of the best books about the horrors of stalinism you can read. Please do 1984 next.

"A wave slowly lifted him up. It came from afar and travelled sedately on, a shrug of eternity." Happy ending for Rubashev.

“Why would these cruel children beat so mercilessly on their sweet and innocent grandparents” contains a premise that might be worth rejecting even if the children are actually cruel