Wizarding School: Uagadou, Uganda
Prompt: Read a book where a character follows a dream
Format: Audiobook (Libby – San Mateo Public Library)

My tryst with picking up books that I should have read long ago but didn’t, got me to pick up Of Mice and Men this year.

I suppose many of you already know this heartbreaking story of George and Lennie. When I started reading, I was relatively uninformed of anything in the book except the public summary, and though I knew something bad would happen, the end still was an emotional gut punch!

George Milton and Lennie Small – two wanderers who try to make in a cruel, unforgiving world. While George knows the way of the land and is street-smart, so to speak, Lennie is a very simple-minded childlike man with the strength of ten horses – while he is a fantastic laborer, he is nothing but a child trapped in a man’s body – a disaster waiting to happen. All these two men have is a dream – a dream that they will one day have their own land, grow crops, tend to animals, and live a life where they don’t have to be laborers on a ranch being kicked around by smug landlords and making $100 a month.

Lennie has the purest of hearts and the nicest of intentions, all he wants to do is live on this dreamland with his mate George, and tend to rabbits – stroke them and feed them alfalfa, which they would grow on their own land. But he is also naive to the point of danger – he barely remembers anything, does “bad things” unintentionally because he doesn’t know any better, and doesn’t understand much of social concepts. Thus, George is left to take care of him and keep him out of reach of trouble.

The story also contains other smaller characters – the men working in the California ranch, the boss, his ass-clown son, his son’s wife, and a black man who loves by himself at the tanning station.

The marvelous thing about Steinbeck’s writing is the way he builds the characters, and tells their story in the simplest, purest, most heartfelt manner. Though from the last few lines, you already want to take Lennie’s side in this story, you simply can’t! Because there’s Crooks, a black man who once had his own land, and now lives like a slave in the ranch, and sleeps by himself in a shed while the other white laborers refuse to stay with him. There is Curley’s wife – she does not even have a name in this story – yearning to be regarded as a woman and a human being and not just abandoned as a useless piece of possession.

This is a wholesome book with characters that would stay in your mind forever, and show you that it takes all kinds to make the world!

My rating: ***** (5/5)