Of Mice and Men & East of Eden & Grapes of Wrath & The Pearl

... but brilliantly written and deserved of its place in history.

For such a well chosen compilation I was amazed that it didn't have a menu of any description at all. If you wanted to read the books in a different order ,say East of Eden first, then you have to flick through every single page to find it. !

Grapes of wrath page 1003

This is a classic for a reason. Decisions to remove it from high school syllabi may be well meaning but are misguided. I think the book offers a range of possibilities for discussions around equality, inclusion, division and prejudice as learnt behaviour. Trying to erase the past rather than learning from it is a mistake.

Memorable characters

I have already read Of Mice & Men but wanted read Grapes of Wrath on my Kindle so thought i might as well get East of Eden thrown in for minimal additional cost.However, as one other review states, there is no table of contents so it's impossible to navigate. If you go to the contents section in navigation you literally just have start & end to choose from. Even if you guesstimate where , for example, Grapes of Wrath might start, you can navigate to a random page but can't see which book you are in. So pretty useless unless you just start at the beginning of the first book (which I'd read already) and then read through them all in order. Such a stupid omission...returned for a refund.

Great stories, unfortunately rendered impossible to enjoy in this shockingly bad Kindle edition.The formatting is unreadable, and the text is littered with endless typos.Plenty of other editions are available - DO NOT BUY THIS.I've never used capitals in a review before. Doesn't feel good... but these typos are very distressing.

Unfortunately impossible to navigate as no contents, so if you want to read one specific novel (ie Grapes) you gotta plough through the 2 novels that precede it.

Very much enjoy Steinbecks writing. Draws you right into the heart of the characters. All three great classic must read at least a couple of times.

This book contains the full text for these 3 famous books, but the Kindle formatting is completely lacking. There are no links for chapters or even for the beginning of each book. You just have to scroll through.Regarding the stories themselves, they are emotionally wrenching. His setting descriptions and character development is detailed; I could imagine being there and I really felt the characters' angst and despair. There are moments of joy, but the overwhelming majority of all 3 books revolves around the hardships of the poor, working class people in the USA in the early 1900's."Of Mice and Men" is a tale of friendship, mental illness and the pain of poverty. It is touching and sad.One of the characters in "East of Eden" is evil to her very core, so much so that she seemed unrealistic to me. I guess that there are such terrible people in the world, but most have a mixture of good and bad. I never got a full grasp of any life events had would have caused her to become that way; she seemed to have been born like that. All the other characters in that story seemed more balanced though. It is a story with multiple storylines about family relationships."Grapes of Wrath" is an emotional gut punch. The story tracks the hardships of this hardworking, honorable but impoverished family who were forced from their homeland by the bank that took over the farm they had lived on for generations. In desperation, the family set off across the country in search of work; they were misled by advertising spread across the country promising high wages. Sadly, there were far more desperate workers than there were jobs, so the unscrupulous landowners were able to pay poverty wages to desperate people, whose families were starving. The workers were abused and had no security at all.This story resonates still today, as the working class continues to struggle to survive and the corporations avoid paying wages that would allow their employees to truly thrive.The book will certainly make you think. Just make sure you are not already depressed; if you are an empathetic person, these stories will leave you reeling.

Four John Steinbeck books in one volume seems a good buy. But be warned: there is no list of contents, no way to skip to the next book, and no way to navigate within a book. Have returned this for a refund.

Very good - as expected!

It has three novels but has no table of contents. If you wanted to read the second one first, I guess you'd have to manually find it by scrolling through hundreds of screens