And January's book is... Of Mice and Men!
We'll be reading Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck for our first novel of 2025.
Hello!
A very happy new year to you all.
First off, let me say that I’m sorry for the delay in sending anything out to you recently. I’d planned to have a book selection poll with you for the end of December, but life got in the way ever so slightly. I’ve since been ill through 2025 so far, and conscious that January is already underway, I’ve picked this month’s book based on previous comments from a few of you.
It means that January’s book will be Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck.
It’s a fairly short novel at just 144 pages long, so four weeks gives us plenty of time to read before we discuss in the Substack chat.
I’ll also be sharing some posts about the novel and the author, like I did previously for Frankenstein and Jamaica Inn. Plus we’ll be back to normal in voting for the next novel at the end of January/start of February.
The discussion will be taking place on the 2nd February.
If you need to purchase this book, I’ve got a few options below.
In the UK, Amazon has a paperback version for £7.85 or the Kindle version for £0.99.
In the USA, Amazon has a paperback version for $4.99 or the Kindle version for $0.99.
I’d recommend checking sites like Vinted or eBay for a cheap deal if you’re looking to save money.
Any issues finding a copy then please let me know and hopefully I can help!
What’s Of Mice and Men about?
Taken from Goodreads, this snippet gives you an idea of what the novel is going to be about. Many of us will have read this novel through school at some point, so it’ll be fun to read again as adults and explore such a classic.
They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. But George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own.
While the powerlessness of the laboring class is a recurring theme in Steinbeck's work of the late 1930s, he narrowed his focus when composing Of Mice and Men, creating an intimate portrait of two men facing a world marked by petty tyranny, misunderstanding, jealousy, and callousness. But though the scope is narrow, the theme is universal: a friendship and a shared dream that makes an individual's existence meaningful.
A unique perspective on life's hardships, this story has achieved the status of timeless classic due to its remarkable success as a novel, a Broadway play, and three acclaimed films.”
Who was John Steinbeck?
I took this brief biography from the Nobel Prize website, to give you a little more information about Steinbeck before we read his work.
“John Steinbeck (1902-1968), born in Salinas, California, came from a family of moderate means. He worked his way through college at Stanford University but never graduated. In 1925 he went to New York, where he tried for a few years to establish himself as a free-lance writer, but he failed and returned to California. After publishing some novels and short stories, Steinbeck first became widely known with Tortilla Flat (1935), a series of humorous stories about Monterey paisanos.
Steinbeck’s novels can all be classified as social novels dealing with the economic problems of rural labour, but there is also a streak of worship of the soil in his books, which does not always agree with his matter-of-fact sociological approach. After the rough and earthy humour of Tortilla Flat, he moved on to more serious fiction, often aggressive in its social criticism, to In Dubious Battle (1936), which deals with the strikes of the migratory fruit pickers on California plantations. This was followed by Of Mice and Men (1937), the story of the imbecile giant Lennie, and a series of admirable short stories collected in the volume The Long Valley (1938). In 1939 he published what is considered his best work, The Grapes of Wrath, the story of Oklahoma tenant farmers who, unable to earn a living from the land, moved to California where they became migratory workers.
Among his later works should be mentioned East of Eden (1952), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), and Travels with Charley (1962), a travelogue in which Steinbeck wrote about his impressions during a three-month tour in a truck that led him through forty American states. He died in New York City in 1968.”
Great! Looking forward to it. I just read East of Eden last year.