Tortilla Flat: 04/30/07

I picked up Sixteen Short Novels at the September BookCrossing meeting last year. Yes; I went a week postpartum and Harriet went too. My goal is to read and review each of these short novels but if I do it all at once I'll only get this one massive book read for quite some time. Instead, I'll concentrate on each novel separately and count each one as its own book just as I did for the four novellas in Four Past Midnight. At that rate I figure I can read about three of these short novels a month and I should have the book ready for release by Harriet's first birthday.

"Tortilla Flat" by John Steinbeck is the first novel in this collection that I've genuinely disliked. He's practically a local author and certainly a well renowned California author but his style of writing often rubs me the wrong way. "Tortilla Flat" is supposed to be a Depression era "knights of the round table" poke at modern conventions and society. Unfortunately it's so ham-fisted that I came away despising all of the main characters and not about any of their idiotic exploits.

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