I was first introduced to Steinbeck in the sixth grade. Forced to read The Pearl as an 11-year old. What? Perhaps my brain wasn't ready to negotiate things as heady as oppression of whole people groups or the corruption that wealth so often brings...go figure. As such, I hated Steinbeck for the longest time. Even the beauty of Of Mice and Men didn't erase the disdain I felt (though I reread that one a few times). It wasn't until reading The Winter of Our Discontent in my mid-twenties that I warmed up to him.
While East of Eden has been in the stack of soon-to-reads for nearly 5 years (gack!), a random overheard conversation debating the merits of Steinbeck vs. Salinger led me to a conversation with a friend. Said friend prefers Salinger, but highly recommended Tortilla Flat. At 151 pages and on the shelf of Stone Alley, it wins.
Here's the deal: this book was extremely hard for me to handle. At one point, I had to force myself to read 20 pages a day. (Yup. 20 pages. And this is me.) Why I allowed this work to take exception to my 50-page-rule, I do not know. I do know that around page 80 I started to enjoy it.
More a collection of short stories about the same cast of characters, it was bearable when I looked to this as a brief series of encounters between friends. With little character development or plot momentum, it is truly akin to a night of jokes and yarns shared over a campfire.
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