Reading John Steinback:

I've reached almost 3/4ths of the story of the "Cannery Row" by Steinback and find myself amazed at the simplicity and pull of his writing. He draws on you a soft coil of rope which tightens with every further sentence of his words, liberating you at the same as grounding you further into the hearth of his story. I would like to call them characters, the people who inhabit his story, but I see them as Lives; lives which are not lived and lived at the same time. What I love about reading him is the way he writes his characters. They are so human  with the quality of struggling to be nothing but themselves. Steinback talks about them as if they form a part of who he is, if he was all of them at once. An unprecedented love flows through the most flawed of his fictional people and there is warmth underlining each personality. He talks about them with the fascination of an unknown reader reading a book which he might have written a while back and has completely forgotten about. While I read, I already decided the passages and lines that I would revisit and reread, for his prose has a lullaby-like quality that induces you to get sucked into it.