For a while I’ve been meaning to email myself a list of Steinbeck books I’ve read/need to read so that when I’m at a bookstore I actually know which ones to acquire in my quest to get through them all.

After reading “Sweet Thursday,” I finally compiled the list and have completed 11 of them with 17 to go.  Though I’ve read the longest ones already, so I consider myself roughly halfway there.

The unread Steinbeck section of my bookshelf

Part of the reason for making the list is that I want to read the rest more or less in order, because in this case, “Sweet Thursday” takes place in the same place as “Cannery Row.”  It’s not necessary to read “Cannery Row” first, but there are a few references that make more sense if you have.

Oddly enough, I meant to grab a different unread Steinbeck from the stack, but I’m glad I ended up reading this one because it’s actually one of my favorite of his I’ve read in a while.  This town is populated with a lot of charming people who have a ton of faults, but just try so hard at life that you can’t help but to root for them or at least laugh at them with empathy.

I’m sure I’ve touched on this in every Steinbeck post before, but if you wanted an epic biography for yourself, he’s the guy you would want following you around.  His descriptions are so unique.

There’s a character named Doc, the town’s smart guy who helps everyone and often ends up getting hurt when their best-laid plans to repay him spectacularly blow up.  One day he’s out in the countryside and meets a stranger:

“This one was a big, bearded stranger with the lively, innocent eyes of a healthy baby,” Steinbeck writes.  “He wore ragged overalls and a blue shirt washed nearly white, and he was barefooted.  The straw hat on his head had two large holes cut in the brim, proof that it had once been the property of a horse.”

Every element of that is nothing short of epic. In another scene, Doc ends up at a diner in Monterey, which is run by a guy named Sonny Boy.  Steinbeck paints him as the precursor to the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man in the World.”

“Sonny Boy can say ‘good evening’ and make it sound like an international plot.”

Sometimes the context of a great line is not important at all.  Like this, which needs to be on a t-shirt:

“There is nothing reassuring about the smile of a tiger.”

Late in the story, the manager of the brothel across the street is getting one of her girls, Suzy, ready for a date she has set up with Doc, and drops this pearl of wisdom that applies pretty much to all humans:

“You know, Suzy, they ain’t no way in the world to get in trouble by keeping your mouth shut,” she says.  “You look back at every mess you ever got in and you’ll find your tongue started it.”

If tigers ever start talking, we’re going to have a serious problem.

Paul Auster has a way of slowly and methodically sucking you into his novels.  “Oracle Night” is certainly one of those books.

The main character is an author who in the course of the story writes part of a book and a treatment for a screenplay.  Auster tells not only the author’s story, but also gives you these others within it.

Those other stories?  They’re kind of amazing too.  The portion of a book follows a guy who nearly gets killed while walking on the street, takes that as a breaking point from his old life, keeps walking and boards a plane to a new city to start over.  It’s a legitimate page-turner and my only disappointment with “Oracle Night” is that I don’t get to know what happens to him.

The film idea is equally great.  The author is asked to develop a script for a “War of the Worlds” movie, and since there is already a straight adaptation, he decides to take it in a new direction.  His idea partly involves people in the future who get to take one ride in a time machine to 200 years in the past in order to observe their ancestors.

You go at age 20, and the author writes that the purpose is to teach you humility and compassion for other people.

“The traveler will understand that he has come from an immense cauldron of contradictions and that among his antecedents are beggars and foold, saints and heroes, cripples and beauties, gentle souls and violent criminals, altruists and thieves.”

I would absolutely watch this movie, and support its implementation in real life.  If you happen to have a time machine, please get this going.

This book had me so into the story I didn’t stop to note many things along the way, but there’s one more bit that caught me attention.  The author’s wife is telling him about a dream in which they ended up in a locked room together.  He asks if she knew what happened to them and she says that’s when she woke up.

“People can’t die in their dreams, you know,” she says.  “Even if the door was locked, something would have happened to get us out.  That’s how it works.  As long as you’re dreaming, there’s always a way out.”

That last line belongs on t-shirts and Pinterest.

Some people talk to themselves, others talk to their dog or cat, but in Nick Hornby’s “Slam,” the main character talks to a Tony Hawk poster.

It’s a storytelling quirk that becomes less and less necessary to move the plot as the book goes along, but every time Sam talks to TH (as he calls him for sake of not having to write it out over and over) I couldn’t help but laugh.  He doesn’t hear words he would imagine coming from TH, but rather quotes from the autobiography that skating-obsessed Sam has read a thousand times.

Take, for example, when he breaks up with his girlfriend and asks TH if he did something wrong by ending things:

“‘If something in my life didn’t revolve around skating, then I had a hard time figuring it out,’ said T.H.  He was talking about Sandy again, his first real girlfriend, but it might have been his way of saying, ‘How the hell do I know?  I’m only a skater.’  Or even, ‘I’m only a poster.'”

That’s the beauty of the Sam-TH relationship.  It’s like thinking about Stewie on Family Guy and why sometimes the adults can understand what he’s saying and sometimes they can’t.  When it’s convenient for Sam (TH agrees with him) then he totally buys in, but at other times he’s very quick to point out the lunacy of the whole thing.

Sam needs all this advice from TH because he’s prone to getting himself into trouble, which isn’t all that unexpected since he’s 16.  Sure that the ex-girlfriend, Alicia, is pregnant, he runs off instead of actually hearing the news in a plan that unravels spectacularly from the beginning.  When he comes back, he vows to be smarter, but knows that’s easier said than done.

“It’s not enough, though, just to decide not to be stupid.  Otherwise, why don’t we decide to be really clever — clever enough to invent something like the iPod and make a lot of money?”

Later Sam and Alicia have an argument in which she accuses him of thinking he has a future for himself, while she is destined for a dead-end life.  He responds by bringing up her stated aspiration of being a model — something she told him in a flirty manner when they first met to gauge his interest.  Naturally, that only made things worse for Sam, who realized his error in mixing a good moment with this one.

“You should never drag stuff out of a nice conversation and chuck it back in the middle of a nasty one.  Instead of one good memory and one bad memory, you’re left with two shitty ones.”

Hornby has been one of my favorite authors for a while, and while this is far from my favorite book of his, he did toss in something I’m sure was just for me:

“I didn’t call Alicia’s dad Mr. Burns anymore.  I called him Robert, which was better, because every time I said Mr. Burns, I thought of an ancient bald bloke who owned the Springfield nuclear reactor.”

I want a Milhouse reference in the next book, Nick.

Book two of the “Divergent” series: done.  Well, I finished “Insurgent” a month ago, but let’s use my blogging procrastination for some sort of good.

In early June, Nationals outfielder Bryce Harper was still healing from a thumb injury that cost him much of the first half of the season.  He returned to the lineup Monday and caused some stirs when he suggested he should be playing center field instead of manning his former home in left.

This became one of those annoying sports “debates” that bounced around talk radio and among people who take this kind of thing way too seriously.  I may have unfollowed a few people on Twitter.

I’m going to use his honest statement to quickly point out that he is Divergent.  Anyone who watches Bryce play for two seconds can see that he has a whole lot of Dauntless pulsing through his veins.  The guy is fearless in the way he throws his body around the field.  Ask him a question, and the Candor part of him comes out.

As with Tris in the books, having multiple faction aptitudes can be a great thing.  In “Insurgent,” she is forced to undergo interrogation under a truth serum at the Candor headquarters.  She admits in front of her Dauntless brethren that she killed one of their friends, a piece of information that causes huge rifts with some of the people with which she used to be the closest.

“The Candor sing the praises of the truth, but they never tell you how much it costs,” she says.

We all appreciate truth and having people be straightforward with us, but there are times where we say completely true, completely honest things that cause nothing but problems.  In time, these things often work themselves out (like the Nats winning every game since Harper’s return), but the intermediary steps can be tough.

Tris wants to move on from shooting her friend Will both because it has messed with her former confidence in her abilities and because she doesn’t like being a social outcast.  She does all she can, including basically deciding to sacrifice herself for the sake of everyone in her faction.  In the end, even Will’s girlfriend, Tris’s good friend Christina, understands and forgives her.

There’s still one book left in this series, and I’m wary of what is next.  Coming into “Insurgent,” my friend and I who are reading them together wondered where the story could go after the first book and were generally pleased with how it went.  But we’ve also heard that the third book is a total letdown, so it’s hard to be super enthusiastic about it.

This is why I usually try to avoid hearing/reading about either a book or movie I’m going to check out for myself.

At one point during “Insurgent,” Tris and the leader of her former faction are at Amity headquarters where they see a water filtration machine at work.

“Both us of watch the purification happen,” she says, “and I wonder if he is thinking what I am: that it would be nice if life worked this way, stripping the dirt from our lives and sending us out into the world clean.  But some dirt is destined to linger.”

As much as I want to go into the third book fresh, there is that bit of dirt that’s going to make me start looking for points at which I think the story is about to go into disappointing territory.  Maybe I’ll just choose to believe that everyone was purposely lying to me and I’ll be pleasantly surprised.