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Wordly Obsessions

~ … the occasional ramblings of a book addict …

Wordly Obsessions

Tag Archives: John Steinbeck

How Fast Can You Read?

23 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Book News, Education, General, Humour, Meme

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Ayn Rand, Fountainhead, James Fenimore Cooper, John Steinbeck, Lord of the Flies, meme, reading speed, Speed reading, William Golding


Congratulations! You are 58% faster than the average adult reader!

I can be a real slow-poke when it comes to reading, I have to admit that. What it takes some people to read in two days I usually complete in a week! It’s a habit I’m not very happy with, so I was really glad I can across this neat ‘Speed Reading Test’ from Staples that lets you know how quick you are compared to the average reader… and how you square up with the world’s fastest word scanner, a lady with an astonishing 4’700 words per min. record! I may not be as fast as her, but I realise I’m not as bad as I thought either.

If you wish to take the test yourself then click on the image below. You will be prompted to read a short piece and then have to answer three questions to check you’ve actually read it. Simples!

ereader test
Source: Staples eReader Department

According to the test I can read the following books in so many hours if I keep to my normal reading speed:

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy in 24 hours and 43 minutes

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand in 13 hours and 7 minutes

Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper in 6 hours and 7 minutes

Lord of the Flies by William Golding in 2 hours and 31 minutes

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck in 7 hours and 8 minutes 

Hmm, maybe I should have timed myself with ‘Lord of the Flies’! I’m quite surprised that it says I can complete it in 2 hours. I’m pretty sure I’ve taken over 2 hours to get to chapter 3! Anyways… Maybe this little test will help me pick up speed a little as I feel more confident for tomes like ‘The Fountainhead’!

Take the test and post your results. How fast can you read?? You might be surprised.

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  • Lord of the Flies by William Golding (thegoodsoldandnew.wordpress.com)
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John Steinbeck – A Letter For Beginners

12 Thursday May 2011

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Authors, Excerpts, Writing

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

John Steinbeck, quotes, writing


John Ernst Steinbeck (February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968)

I don’t want to write too much and spoil the perfection of the following letter that is addressed to aspiring writers. If anyone has looked for a mentor to guide them along this lonely road of letters, then I give them John Steinbeck’s inspirational texts. Here’s a man who trod the path, understood what writing was ‘really’ about, and managed to convey it in ways that us beginners could  understand.

So, this is for all those who cannot ‘see’ their way clearly and are confused as to where their road is taking them, and to those in particular who think ‘reading’ is experience enough to write a good book. Steinbeck highlights the necessity of an inner enlightenment for all wannabe writers, one that borders on the Buddhistic:

“Dear Writer:

 Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat in a class in story writing at Stanford, I remember the experience very clearly. I was bright-eyes and bushy-brained and prepared to absorb the secret formula for writing good short stories, even great short stories. This illusion was canceled very quickly. The only way to write a good short story, we were told, is to write a good short story. Only after it is written can it be taken apart to see how it was done. It is a most difficult form, as we were told, and the proof lies in how very few great short stories there are in the world.

The basic rule given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules. A story could be about anything and could use any means and any technique at all – so long as it was effective. As a subhead to this rule, it seemed to be necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat of our story to one sentence, for only then could we know it well enough to enlarge it to three- or six- or ten-thousand words.

So there went the magic formula, the secret ingredient. With no more than that, we were set on the desolate, lonely path of the writer. And we must have turned in some abysmally bad stories. If I had expected to be discovered in a full bloom of excellence, the grades given my efforts quickly disillusioned me. And if I felt unjustly criticized, the judgments of editors for many years afterward upheld my teacher’s side, not mine. The low grades on my college stories were echoed in the rejection slips, in the hundreds of rejection slips.

It seemed unfair. I could read a fine story and could even know how it was done. Why could I not then do it myself? Well, I couldn’t, and maybe it’s because no two stories dare be alike. Over the years I have written a great many stories and I still don’t know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.

It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but, after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.

I remember one last piece of advice given me. It was during the exuberance of the rich and frantic ’20s, and I was going out into that world to try to be a writer.

I was told, “It’s going to take a long time, and you haven’t got any money. Maybe it would be better if you could go to Europe.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful. I wonder whether or not you can stand the shame of being poor.”

It wasn’t too long afterward that the depression came. Then everyone was poor and it was no shame anymore. And so I will never know whether or not I could have stood it. But surely my teacher was right about one thing. It took a long time – a very long time. And it is still going on, and it has never got easier.

      She told me it wouldn’t.

                                                                          John Steinbeck, 1963

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Best Bits ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ | The Tractor Man…

02 Friday Jul 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Authors, Excerpts

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, tractor man


“And in the tractor man their grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding or no relation. For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates, and the length of fibre in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor is salt nor water nor calcium. He is all of these, and he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows that the land is more than its analysis.”
 

One of the most poignant parts of the novel, the Tractor Man. I love how Steinbeck talks about blessings and curses. This part almost made me weep. There is a timelessness to it, such beautiful imagery.

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Excerpt from ‘Grapes of Wrath’ | On the Divorce of Humanity and Nature

23 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Authors, Excerpts

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

California dustbowl, Grapes of Wrath, Joad family, John Steinbeck, migrant workers, oklahoma


Photo by Dorothea Lange during the Great Depression, 1936. Depicting the plight of the workers,
and the injustice of being uprooted from the only life they knew…

“The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not own. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.” – Chapter 5, p.38

 
‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is a powerful novel set during the Great Depression, when famine, poverty and changes in agriculture caused thousands of farming families to migrate from Oklahoma to California. The novel tells of the hardships of the Joad family, and their paper-thin hope of a better life in California. This bleak story takes the reader on a journey that spirals deeper and deeper into disappointment and hopelessness. Steinbeck’s novel is an illuminating and vivid account of the people of the dustbowl and tells the painful truth about the class divide that caused so many of them to die of hunger. The novel won the Pulitzer prize in 1940 and was highly praised by President Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor despite being vilified by politicians and Californian officials. It was even publicly banned and burned by citizen’s because it was seen as ‘communist propaganda’.
 
Steinbeck travelled widely and observed the migration first-hand to get a true understanding of what was really happening during the Great Depression. ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is unique and timeless because it steers the focus away from the political scene. Instead Steinbeck writes from the perspective of the migrants, showing us the human face of the suffering, not the statistics and reports.
 
The novel is not only a portrayal of the US government’s betrayal of its people, but is also a commentary on the many different ways humanity subsequently became divorced from mother nature.

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John Steinbeck | on ‘The Grapes of Wrath’

22 Tuesday Jun 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Authors

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

California dustbowl, Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, migrant workers, Salinas, working days


“If I could do this book properly it would be the really fine books and a truly American book. But I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability. I’ll just have to work from a background of these. Honesty. If I can keep an honesty it is all I can expect of my poor brain… If I can do that it will be all my lack of genius can produce. For no one else knows my lack of ability the way I do. I am pushing against it all the time.”

Taken from ‘Working Days’ (The Journal of John Steinbeck), entry June 18th 1938.
This was written by Steinbeck just 3 weeks into the novel ‘The Grapes of Wrath’. Not only do his words display an endearing vulnerability, but also double up as pearls of wisdom that throw a light into the psychological preparations, tribulations and confrontations a working novelist must encounter with every work he or she produces. Here he describes the ghost that ceaselessly haunts all authors, that is, the terrible fear that this time they may not be good enough. Steinbeck’s honesty is definitely a virtue that shines through in his writing. He is a very ‘human’ writer, and ‘Grapes of Wrath’ can be called his most startling work about a distinctive period in American history; one where the sufferers had no voice.
 
One one thinks of Steinbeck, we think of migrant workers, Salinas and the California dust-bowls. His name has become synonymous with that period of American history, mainly because he saw and wrote things from a workers’ point of view. He has preserved its particular lingua with his excellent ear for rustic conversation. When all is said and done, reflecting honesty is sometimes the only true goal a writer can have to fall back on.

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Quick Review | ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ Ken Kesey

22 Tuesday Jun 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Book Review

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

chief bromden, John Steinbeck, ken kesey, one flew over the cuckoos nest, psychiatric ward, United States


One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was one of the books on the 1001 Book list, and I would like to give this one 3.5 really, purely for the way it always caught me out with its fresh, often razor-sharp imagery of the warped human mind. The mind in question is none other than Chief Bromden, the supposedly deaf and mute narrator.

Bromden’s spectacular hallucinations alone should be reason enough for anyone to pick up this book and read it. They are quite unique, disturbing, and often (to my alarm) actually made sense on some level. Suffice it to say, they cut through the narrative like… well… like electric shock therapy! All the way through, it made me wonder if Kesey was writing from experience. The introduction to this edition was particularly enlightening, as it gave a lot of background information on Kesey’s involvement with drug testing during the 1960’s. Maybe he actually saw similar things when he was a volunteer during these sessions.

As hard as it was to actually get into this novel, I have come to believe that this is a must-read for those interested in psychiatric care. It’s inspirational and questions that fine (often too fine) line between sanity and real madness. Kesey made me reflect on just who really WERE the psychos in the novel – the staff or the inmates?

This took me much longer to read than I had anticipated, but I think I can say it was worth it. It’s one of those books that look good when you can claim to have read it.

View all my reviews >>

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Grapes of Wrath | ‘100 Days of Writing’

19 Saturday Jun 2010

Posted by mywordlyobsessions in Authors, Excerpts

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

100 days of writing, Caskie Stinnet, Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck


 
‘In 1963 Steinbeck told Caskie Stinnet: “I wrote ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ in one hundred days, but many years of preparation preceded it. It took a hell of a long time to get started. The actual writing is the last process.”
 
Though Steinbeck actually wrote the novel in ninety-three sittings, it was his way of saying that Grapes of Wrath was an intuited whole that embodied the form of his devotion. The entire 200’000 word manuscript took upto 165 handwritten pages (plus one smaller sheet) of a 12×18″ lined ledger book. When he was hot, Steinbeck wrote fast, paying little or no attention to spelling, punctuation or paragraphing. On top of that his script was so small he was capable of cramming over 1300 words onto a single sheet.’
 
– Introduction to The Grapes of Wrath  
 

If you haven’t read the introduction to ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, then I suggest you do. It’s filled with very important facts on how the novel came to be written. Everything seemed to be sparked by a moment of inspiration, the genesis of it was driven purely by the need to chase down and live to the very core of this unique event. The mere thought of writing a 200’000 word manuscript in just over 100 days is an incredible feat. More amazingly, almost every word he wrote was published exactly as he wrote it. No wonder I love his writing so much. It’s raw and it comes from the heart. True novelists write about what they know, what they’ve lived. They aren’t afraid to have life show through the bones of their work.

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