This book has been on my TBR list since about when a co-worker recommended East of Eden to me around 2006. It boosted up that list after I read The Four Winds and thought, “man, I wish I would have actually read The Grapes of Wrath when it was assigned to me in high school”. When I mentioned to a friend that it had been assigned and I hadn’t read it, they couldn’t believe I could remember any of the books I was assigned. I was not appreciative enough to my phenomenal English teachers at my big public high school. I know I was an arrogant little shit when I was in HS, but I hadn’t connected my not reading powerful works like this to it. Would I have been a more empathetic person as a teen had I read this?
The issues of the book are still relevant today. Rampant economic equality, the unfair hypocrisy of employers colluding on wages yet using state violence to squash worker organization, the abysmal treatment of homeless people and migrants. While I was growing up in an economically comfortable suburb, there was never money left over, and I knew I was going to have to pay my own way through college. I am in a much better economic situation now, yet I feel like I am more moved by the plight of the Okies than I was. I am the reverse of the idea that people get more conservative as they age.
While I feel reading this book has been important to me now, I am disappointed in myself 30 years ago for not reading it. People ask for advice they’d give their younger selves? Mine, today, is: do the damn reading.
by baseball_mickey