Summer readin'

Needless to say, I have quite a bit of downtime during the day when I'm in-between projects. Before tackling the book club list that ML so kindly wrote out, I decided to look back on my bookshelves at all of the required reading I had during my high school summers. I've read a LOT of Steinbeck, and not with very fond memories I must say. But reading his "Travels with Charley" has made me appreciate his prose so much more. This book is Steinbeck's recollection of taking a cross-country tour for 3 months around America in a trailer with his old French poodle. No one knew who he was the entire time, and he traveled along the back roads of the country meeting truckers and friendly strangers. I think it helps that I am reading for pleasure and at my leisure now, rather than trying to retain as much information and speed through it as quickly as possible before a pop quiz. Anyway, here's one paragraph about turkeys that just sums up his entertaining writing style:

"To know them is not to admire them, for they are vain and hysterical. They gather in vulnerable groups and then panic at rumors. They are subject to the sicknesses of other fowl, together with some they have invented. Turkeys seem to be manic-depressive types, gobbling with blushing wattles, spread tails, and scraping wings in amorous bravado at one moment and huddled in craven cowardice the next. It is hard to see how they can be related to their wild, clever, suspicious cousins. But here in their thousands they carpeted the earth waiting to lie on their backs on the platters of America."

Maybe I'm a geek to admire how beautifully he constructed that paragraph. But man! What a good writer!