Week of October 20-26 Entry #7

This week, I have read chapters 25 through 27. In this section, the reason why this book is titled Grapes of Wrath comes out. In chapter 25, we see how large farmers harass the tenant farmers by monopolizing the industry. Hence, small farmers' debts increase. The book says that "the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy." In the next chapter, Casy gets killed by a police, just for being accused as a communist. Tom takes revenge by killing the murderer police, but he gets hit too. After killing the police, Tom also runs away. Chapter 27 is about the tenant farmers and people who are looking for jobs. They are poorly treated with extremely low wages.
Now, the story is coming to an end and seems to reach some climax. Poor people are still being ripped off and now Casy has died. I start to kind of get the theme of this story in which poor people had harsh conditions in the colonial times. Again, if I was to live in this kind of condition, I would hate it. Also, I have thought that if I was one of the huge farmers who were monopolizing the market, I wouldn't do that. The acts of these people seem so inhumane and cruel. I would at least give some space for the small farmers to join in the market so that they don't starve.

Week of October 13-19 Entry #6

This week, I have read chapters 21~24. These chapters talk about how more big landowners push out small landowners and how the small tenant farmers live. Many aspects of farmers' lives are shown such as the Weedpatch camp and being baptized by preachers.
Now, I am starting to get a little bored to this book. The story just seems to be endless. The farmers just moved to avoid misery but it didn't end. They are just living hard lives. They drink alcohol, sing, get preached, look for jobs, but they fail. That's all they do and the mood of the story never seems to fluctuate a lot, which makes the book feel like watching everyday-life of a machine. Yet, the story seems to proceed little by little, which is at least a little relieving. However, I wish I could see some more progress to the depressing mood in the next chapters.

Week of October 6-12 Entry #5

This week, I have read chapters 18 through 20. Basically, the story continues to flow on. In chapter 18, the Joads get warned by a man and his son, who are coming back from California. They say that there are no jobs in California. In chapter 19, the perspective changes and the narrator explains a brief history of California. California was once part of Mexico. The story comes back again to the tenant farmers in chapter 20. Chapter 20 describes some more hardships of the tenant farmers. Grampa is dead, but the family does not have money to bury the dead body properly. Also, Tom and Casy meed a man named Floyd. Floyd explains that they cannot organize together to find jobs because if so, the police will arrest them. Despite Floyd's words, some farmers try to fight against landowners and, Tom and Casy attack the police. Casy takes all the blame and gets arrested.
Again, as I have written before, this story consistently changes perspectives, and it makes me so confused. I guess that is why so many people call it difficult and "classic," which always implies the meaning "boring." Anyways, the story just seems to flow on. Every time I read, the hardships the tenant farmer group faces changes. First was the landowners who drove them away. Second was the greedy salespeople, and the third was the police, who only favored the landowners. As I was reading this part, I have started to thank that I wasn't born at this period. The life of these people didn't seem hard; it was just hopeless. Nothing good happened for them. Some even died during the journey. Still, I start to find this book less boring, but more interesting because the introduction seems to be done. I wonder what will happen to Casy later on.

Week of September 29 - October 5 Entry #4

This week, I read 6 chapters, 12 through 17, of the book The Grapes of Wrath. This part of the book describes the journies of the tenant farmers. Eventually, all the farmers suffer under harsh conditions and cheatings of greedy salesmen. In the story, the tenant farmers who are moving are ripped off by car salesmen. Those salesmen change the parts of cars into cheaper, older ones. Later on, when the farmers move, those cars stop and farmers suffer finding replacements from nearby towns.
This book felt new to me because overall, I have never read a book like this. Before, I have always read si-fi and never experienced classic books like this one. So, I can't get used to the literary style of The Grapes of Wrath. The way Steinbeck descriptions of scenes sound different from fictions. Steinbeck seems to portray it so that the readers can actually draw the scene in their heads. This sounds great, but this makes the book somewhat boring. Also, the atmosphere feels exotic from what I have read and experienced. The overall mood of this book is so depressing I can't hold this book long. I think that is one of the reasons why I feel this book is so hard to read, but I think this is worth the effort. Another thing I felt about this book is that this book sounds too much like a story. Other books that I have read before seems to have a clear plot line around the main character with limited characters and conflicts, but The Grapes of Wrath just merely sounds like a "story" that just flows regardless of what the characters do. I am not sure how it will change later on, but until now, this book just sounds like a story to me. I wonder what will happen to the miserable farmers in this story.

Week of September 22-28 Entry #3

Chapter 10 and 11 talks about farmers getting prepared to move and after they move out. In Chapter 10, Tom and Casy join the farmer group and help the group prepare to leave. The farmers do work such as salting meat. At the end of the chapter, the farmers finally leave. A grampa suddenly change his mind and decides to stay and the rest of the group leave the land and head towards California.
Chapter 11 is about the land that was left after the farmers left to California. The author describes the land as barren because some people are left there and they cultivate the land, but they are not so enthusiastic enough to actually grow crops there. The author says that these workers just drive a tractor over the land everyday. The men left in this land seem to have little skill in cultivation.

Week of September 21-28Entry #2

This week, the independent reading was done in class because we had to do the oral presentations on our Things Fall Apart scrapbooks. Since the class wasn't so silent due to other kids being nervous, I couldn't read a lot. Yet, I read about 30 pages despite the bad conditions.
From this part of the book, the story starts to flow. Chapter 7 is somewhat different from the precedent part of the story. This talks about how a salesmen could cheat tenant farmers. If a car seller changes the car's important parts into older and cheaper components, the salesmen could make more profit because the farmers don't know well about cars.
Chapter 8 starts to talk about Tom and Casy going to uncle John's house. Tom talks about Unlce John to Casy. Later, they arrive to the farm of Uncle John, but they found out that the place has been abandoned.
Chapter 9, the next chapter relates to chapter 6 again. It talks about the tenant farmers preparing to move to California. The interesting part of this chapter is the people who help the farmers move are ripping them off and the author is taking the perspective of a typical tenant farmer who is disappointed about moving to California.

Week of September 17-20 Entry #1

Book Read: The Grapes of Wrath
Author: John Steinbeck
Entry 1

The Grapes of Wrath. Some students might recognize the title of this book if he or she has an elder sibling. Some may know this book even though they don't have an older sibling because of its notoriety. The information of this book indicate that this is a classic book written in the 1930s by John Steinbeck, whom we know as the author of The Pearl, and is one of the hardest, enduring, and painstaking book to read. However, this is an inevitable book that we have to encounter in our high school year. I wanted to have some experience with the book, so I checked this book out of the library.
As I was reading this book, I noticed that what I heard was true. The first day I got this book, I read two pages and I was already half-sleeping. The first few pages describe one scene of a village in detail. For students who haven't been reading a lot, this book is rigorous. Yet, I endured the hardships and proceeded on. The basic plot is that a group of farmers are pushed out of their land in America during the early times of the United States, and are forced to move to California, and this book portrays the hopeless and hard conditions of the migration. The main character is Tom, a man who stayed in prison for 4 years for killing a man in a fight when drunk. I have read up to chapter 6, but not much has happened except for the fact that a group of farmers are forced to move, and Tom is with Jim Casy, a former preacher who quit preaching because of bad sexual relations. Anyways, this book seems to be an interesting, but hard book. I am looking for to check out whether the things I have heard about this notorious book is really true or not.