Can't believe some teachers make teenagers read this in school.

Don't get me wrong, this was good but it's so... miserable. Everyone's live is so awful.
I need to continue reading more by the author!

Edit: I know the misery is the point. Doesn't mean I enjoyed reading it. It was fine just not a favorite.

John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is a novella (around 72 pages) that focuses on two men in The Great Depression Era. George is a small man while Lennie is the bigger man. They are two farmhands who have a big dream to one day own their own small place. However, George and Lennie have just been run out of town. Is this ranch their second chance? Will George and Lennie realize their dream?Of Mice and Men is a very dark novella. I mean dark. Steinbeck is a master at setting the scene. He begins eac...

Oh shit. Don't laugh at me but I just now got this: Of Mice & Men has been on my bucket list for a while. It's one of those stories that are kind of everywhere, but somehow I've still managed to avoid spoilers for the past 45 years.How?I'm going to go out on a long shaky limb and say it's probably because nothing about me lends itself to paying any attention to mopey books about ranch hands. Steinbeck covers a lot of ground in this relatively small tale. The casually horrible racism, the pli...

Sometimes people can do awful things, sometimes they mean it, and sometimes they don't. In this novel we learn the story of "George" and "Lennie". Two wandering day laborers traveling together; from work to work, from trouble to trouble. One small and cunning; the other giant, and retarded. Working from city to city, from field to field, but always protecting each other. A dream pushes them forward, work the fields until one day have enough to purchase a small farm of their own. A place where ...

"Yet each man kills the thing he loves..." Oscar Wilde's prison poem came to mind not only for its literal truth in the context of Lenny and George, but also because it evokes the brutal isolation of the whole cast of characters, each one of them stuck in their separate reality and unable to connect with each other. The young lonely wife has nobody to confide in, and keeps looking for trouble out of sheer isolation. The black man is so utterly alone that he is almost insane, and the barrier of ...

I remember reading this at school at being completely uninterested in the story. I remember the teacher droning on about basic plot allegories before we read each section; she would tell us what certain things “meant” before we had even seen them. She would explain how this portrays a vital part of American culture and a vital element of human nature. All in all we were told what to see in the book before we even began reading. Perhaps she should have just let us read it first, and see what we t...

Of Mice and Men is a tale about the ultimate kindness - it is hard to talk about kindness without turning sentimental but John Steinbeck was the one who really could.

His ear heard more than what was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.

Simple-minded men of this cruel world live in their own dreamlands and they dream of rainbows.

Well, somehow I've managed to read close to 800 books by now, and none of those had been Of Mice and Men. That has been remedied now, and I'm feeling emotionally drained by it. So yeah.I suppose pretty much everyone knows the heartbreaking story of Lennie and George. I was relatively 'unspoiled' and still knew what happened in the end. I just did not know how or why, but figured out those pretty quickly into the book. And still that did not help the sense of impending doom that was like one prot...

“Trouble with mice is you always kill 'em. ”

Breathtaking prose, touching characters and a heart breaking ending. Who said only lengthy novel can make an impact?

I needed a quick read because I stupidly forgot that the library would be closed yesterday for Veteran's Day. I'd exhausted my current supply, and I needed a short term fix to hold me until I could get some new product today. So I grabbed Of Mice and Men off the bookshelf last night.And I'm glad I did because I'd somehow remembered that this was a depressing book. How wrong I was! Oh, sure there were some tense moments like when you think Lennie will accidently hurt Curley's wife in the barn. Wh...