Colin Leslie

What a journey! It's taken me 30+ years to read this thing, I've started and given up numerous times. I'd built it up as a marathon and set myself to fail...until now. For some reason this time I waded in, kept my feet wet and before you knew it I couldn't stop reading. This thing is incredible, the level of detail, the beauty of the prose, the sheer depth is unbelievable. So why not 5 stars? Well it's still a monster of a book to grapple with. I doubt anyone could read this and absorb everything the first time so I'm leaving that final star for some future re-read, for now, I'll return to the rest of Tolkien's writing in a whole new light...the road goes ever on.

A very short but powerful novella. The calls for it to be censored make no sense to me, anyone reading this can see that Steinbeck is clearly empathising with a whole group of disenfranchised characters, the language, racism and sexism are all part of the characters lives and need to be read as a portrayal of reality rather than an author seeking to benefit from exploitation.

Well written and well researched but a hard book to love. The heroes are stripped naked and revealed in all their insecurities and weaknesses. This is hard to take for a fan of the comedy legends but the bigger problem was the darkness that pervades this tale. An all encompassing gloom that seems contradictory to the comic legends on the screen. Did they never laugh, were they never happy? I enjoyed the book but will keep my heroes pure and innocent and most importantly very, very funny.