What I Just Read: The Pearl

For a look at the the Underlings thoughts on the cover, look here.

Think Lord Of The Rings, but instead of magical creatures you have Mexicans and a pearl instead of a ring, now shrink it down to under 90 pages and you have John Steinbeck's The Pearl.

Being a novella, Steinbeck's famous longwinded prose is lacking (the sctual writing makes me feel as if I am reading a childrens story complete with life moral) so my idea of trying to inch my way in to liking Steinbeck may require to just crack open East of Eden or Grapes of Wrath and dive on in. But that would not be for quite some time.

And the story itself is a good one, because of it's size you are thrown right into the story. Though it lacks character development, for obvious reasons, you do get a good sense of what type of person both Kino and his wife Juana are, enough that you can understand their decisions and forsee what they will do as the book develops.

All in all I liked it for what it was, a long short story, and as I said I haven't found a new love for Steinbeck by reading this but I haven't ruled out reading and re-reading his actual novels.

I'll have the books for the flight up tonight or tomorrow morning (Egypt time that is) so be looking for those.