Books 287, 279 meetings, 23 retreats/outings, and 288 blogs!
This year, we are reading two Pulitzer Prize-winning authors. Willa Cather in July. And this month is John Steinbeck.
Diana hosted this month and, in keeping with the book's road trip theme, provided us with a lovely picnic-style meal. We enjoyed two types of Croissant Chicken Salad sandwiches, accompanied by potato salad, baked beans, and deviled eggs. We had Angel Food Cake with strawberries, whipped cream, and brownies. She also had Champagne, which we mixed with strawberry lemonade and other assorted wines, and tea.
The two traveled in a custom camper he named after Don Quixote's horse, Rocinante. He was warned that traveling incognito would be difficult, as he was so widely known. He did take precautions, only to discover no one recognized him at all. Steinbeck was 58 and not in the best of health when he headed out on this excursion to rediscover what "Americans are like today."
His travels took him from Long Island through New England and on to the Pacific Northwest. From Seattle, he follows the coastline to his childhood home of Salinas. Here, he finds the truth of Thomas Wolfe’s novel, “You Can’t Go Home Again.”
Our consensus was that Steinbeck was really searching for a sense of nostalgia and a longing for the self he'd been when writing those stories. But progress, industry, and population explosion had changed the topography. And, Steinbeck was not the same.
Steinbeck was looking for the “authentic” America. But America is too big with too many diverse regions. There is no one-size-fits-all American.
The last leg of the trip finds him road-weary and exhausted; all he wants to do is go home. So, in the end, he did "go home again." But it was to his current self, his current life, his current wife.
There were those who critiqued the book as not fully factual. He combined characters and left out parts where he stayed in nicer hotels. But, we didn't think it was that kind of travel book. He wasn't recommending places and giving reviews, and he met too many people to record them all. So, making composite characters only made sense.
I’m glad to have been on the road with John and Charley. It tells me that the more things change, the more they stay the same. It reminded me of the road trips Carla and I took on Rt 66 to complete our passport books. That was a couple of months of memorable experiences I could never have predicted. It started out as a kind of scavenger hunt, but turned into a journey of discovery of our state.
The book rated a 4.
Next month, we will be at Barb's on July 12. We have switched our Willa Cather novel to My Antonia.
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