Book Review: Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck

This is a must-read. If you didn't have the pleasure of reading this book at school, do your self a favour and get it and read it. It's a short book (100 pages roughly) so it won't take you long to read at all. I found myself reading it twice over back-to-back. The standout themes in the book for me were companionship and loyalty. In particular, the companionship and loyalty that the two main characters – George and Lennie – display towards each other. We see how companionship and loyalty gives these two characters a sense of completeness. We see how other characters in the book who are missing this have a sense of incompleteness about them. To summarise: It's a top-drawer book. Get it. Read it.

Here are my favourite quotes from the book:

Slim: "Guys don't need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus' works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella."

Crooks: "You go on get outta my room. I ain't wanted in the bunk house, and you ain't wanted in my room... They play cards in there, but I can't play because I'm black. They say I stink. Well, I tell you, you all of you stink to me."

Crooks: "S'pose you didn't have nobody. S'pose you couldn't go into the bunk house and play rummy 'cause you was black. How'd you like that? S'pose you had to sit out here an' read books. Sure you could play horseshoes till it got dark, but then you got to read books. Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody—to be near him... A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. Don't make no difference who the guy is, long's he's with you. I tell ya... I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick."

Crooks: "A guy sets alone out here at night, maybe readin' books or thinkin' stuff like that. Sometimes he gets thinkin', an' he got nothing to tell him what's so an' what ain't so. Maybe if he sees something', he don't know whether it's right or not. He can't turn to some other guy and ast him if he sees it too. He can't tell. He got nothing to measure by."

Crooks: "I seen too many guys with land in their head. They never get none under their hand."