Remembrance of things read.

May 9, Salinas, California.

Might well be another world. We're only a few miles from the coast and it's as if we were in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley. Flat, definitely warmer, endless fields of strawberries, cabbage, more strawberries.
Discovering Monterey and now Salinas brings to mind discovering Steinbeck as a college student, the joy of reading something so alive and real after the drudgery of plowing through the French classics in high school, all the images Of Mice and Men that are still with me, the straightforwardness of the writing yet the impact of the images in my mind, reading all the American classics as a freshman in college studying English, and loving it.
College in France is different than in the States in that you specialize from the first year on. You get in an English program, say, or a psychology one, to study that subject exclusively. All the basics that are covered in the first two years of a U.S. college have been covered in high school, and when I was going to high school that was still true, although it is probably not so much anymore.
So I read Melville and Steinbeck and Hawthorne and Ralph Ellison and DH Lawrence, and Shakespeare of course, struggling through the books and loving every minute of it, with few exceptions. Loving the language, loving learning the language, its richness and subtleties not obvious right away but revealed only after studying for a while, each writer's style appreciated yet later. Later still, well out of college, the phases, reading but Faulkner, having to have one of his books after another, a junky. And the images stayed, like Steinbeck and his Cannery Row.
It was better in my mind.