Books you disliked, then later re-read and loved

Steibbeck is trash for middle americans. But you should take my opinion with a grain o salt because the only literature that I enjoy is ironic postmodern wankery

>>8634502
I didn't read it in high school but I recently read that same book at 26 and I thought it would be immature but it turned out to be fantastic.

I read a nonfiction book earlier this year about a cotton growing family in CA called the Boswells. It was a great book and if you're interested in the bosses of the okies and all the shady shit that went down during that time you should read it, the title is The King of California.

>>8634513

Thanks for the recommendation! I'll check it out.

>>8634509

I'm from Denmark, so reading this stuff at 15 as a second or third language isn't so easy.

>>8634502
Cannery Row before I acquired a taste for Steinbeck's prose.
>>8634509
I see this opinion a lot, but naysayers rarely have any complaint outside of his subject matter.

>>8634530
>Thanks for the recommendation! I'll check it out.
No problem. I live in and grew up in the California central valley and since reading those books I've been getting more interested in the history of this place as well as the current agriculture situation which is pretty extreme.

Between the Bay Area technocrats and the Central Valley super farms California is becoming a feudal society with all the land owned by a small portion of the population and everyone in debt peonage. A decent series of articles on the current bosses of the central valley farms and ranches were written by Yasha Levine (too sensationalist but good subject matter) called Oligarch Valley that you can read on Amazon.

>>8634559
I live in the County GoW was set in.
Back in the day when it came out, the farmers here would have an annual book burning and only burn copies of GoW because they hated it so much.

Coincidentally were the most illiterate county in the nation.

Fun lil factoids for ya

>>8634578

Do you know why they burned it? It seems to shit on the owners, not the farmers at all.

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>>8634502
>More or less the same thing happened with To Kill a Mockingbird. Tried it in high school, failed, re-read later and was impressed.

>>8634593
I don't know. I would doubt if they collectively read and analyzed it, probably just bad reading comprehension on one guy's part and those that read it after already made up their minds that it was bad

>>8634593
I'm the first CA anon

People here in the central valley, well I now live in the People's Republic of Davis where people are educated/students, are stupid.

They hate the government out of principle but demand them to do something when shit goes down. It's to the benefit of the big owners to keep them in this state so they don't realize who controls the water and good land.

That King of California has a lot of good examples of the big farmers manipulating Washington to execute massive public works projects (drained/"reclaimed" Tulare Lake) then finagling their way out of paying for it because this is "'merica dammit!".

>>8634502
I read it for the first time this year and it didn't strike me as anything more than a period piece with bones to pick with capitalism. Disliked stuff like the heavy handed marxist jesus metaphor. Disliked the "sincere yokel that occasionally spouts a profound truism without knowing he did" trope. I enjoyed the odd vignette chapters though, and Steinbeck's ethos to starkly portray the depression, if only to tell a story about it.

>>8634656
The vignettes were definitely great along with Reverend Cas. The scene at the end introducing "the ghost of Tom Joads" was top tier imo.

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>>8634661

>>8634578

Why did they hate it if they couldn't read it?

>>8634652
>People's Republic of Davis

so gay

>>8635713
I didn't choose the name but sodomy is mandated here which I like.

Didn't do it at school but read it around the age of 20-22 and loved it

>>8634542
The problem with Steinbeck is he's so often a mushy sentimental socialist. It's most glaring in Travels with Charlie, he meets all these "Eccentric and perhaps misguided" characters that deep down are just people like him.

He has the same problem Tolstoi had, he romanticizes a lower class group he's not a part of (Steinbeck was a Rich Yankee not a Midwesterner) but he lacks any of Tolstoi's depth or literary talent.

The only book where his style really worked was Of mice and Men because that work should have been sentimental. Even that book ran into problems when Crooks started preaching about his situation.

>>8636019
>he romanticizes a lower class group he's not a part of
I get the impression that Tolstoy idolized French aristocrats who were definitely not lower class.

>>8636043
He has a much bigger fetish for lower class Russians, I mean just read the Death of Ivan Illych. The dumb lower class servant boy who holds his legs up being the ideal character in the work.
It's also obvious in Anna Karenina and The Cossacks and his other works.