I will likely finish John Steinbeck‘s entire body of work sometime this year, and I love the whole Dubliners-esque storytelling method of immersing you in some incredibly atmospheric setting—town/village/bar/bus stop/etc.—then giving extensive exposition and character profiles to a bunch of people, and trusting that the story will happen along the way ( it always does). But his physical descriptions of other human beings can be absolutely mystifying. Maybe they were comprehensible for his readers at that time? Maybe they were like “Tooooootally. That is SUCH a type of person, John!”, when he wrote sprawling MadLibs shit like “Dolly Avenelle was an architectural and dyspeptic 45 year-old mother of three, who had never learned to dance on account of an airy limp acquired after an ox blood Model-T that only ran in reverse backed over her foot in childhood. She went through three hazy labors to produce three corduroy daughters, all with splintering eyes and plaid, frozen hair. Every day, (except Thursday, for that was orchard day), they joined her in tending the furious chrysanthemums in the Avenelles’ rusted aluminum garden. In the blue early morning, her fretting knees always glided Westward, towards the vomiting Pacific Ocean, where frail Mexican men with sandwich hearts wove fishing nets, and nooses for the Holy monsters of the California mission.”