Book # 6 - The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

This is the third time I've read The Grapes of Wrath and I always have the same thought.... what kind of a name is Rose of Sharon? Anyway... the book still remains relevant to our times. Someone once mentioned it to me as the polar opposite of Atlas Shrugged and during this reading it seemed especially true.

The novel follows the Joad family as their Oklahoma farm is taken away from them by a bank and they travel across the country to California to become fruit pickers only to find that the price of labor is kept so artificially low by collusion among farm owners that they barely can make enough money to feed themselves. So it is pretty much a take down of unregulated free market capitalism. Did the scenes where policemen would bust up potential unions remind me a little bit of Wal-Mart... or the bank literally plowing over the Joad's house of the housing market collapse? Yeah a little bit.

Yep, one of my favorite books. A+

So after finishing this book I'm 60% of the way though the initial top 100 list and a third of the way though the top 200. So here's my updated rankings of the top 200 I've read so far.

1. The Lord of the Rings 2. Dune 3. Les Misérables

4. Invisible Man

5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

6. Don Quixote

7. The Hobbit

8. A Farewell to Arms 9. The Big Sleep 10. The Grapes of Wrath 11. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

12. The Trial 13. The Magic Mountain

14. David Copperfield

15. Great Expectations

16. Harry Potter

17. The Stand

18. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

19. Pale Fire

20. The Handmaid's Tale

21. Perfume 22. A Christmas Carol 23. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

24. The Chronicles of Narnia

25. The Name of the Rose

26. The Great Gatsby

27. The Sound and the Fury

28. Frankenstein

29. Pride and Prejudice 30. Lord of the Flies

31. The New York Trilogy 32. The Color Purple

33. Things Fall Apart

34. Tristram Shandy 35. Wind in the Willows

36. Anne of Green Gables

37. Rebecca

38. Lucky Jim 39. Atonement

40. One Hundred Years of Solitude

41. Native Son

42. Anna Karenina

43. Sons and Lovers

44. War and Peace

45. A Passage to India

46. A Prayer for Owen Meany 47. The Kite Runner 48. Watership Down 49. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 50. The Count of Monte Cristo

51. The Scarlet Letter

52. Winnie-the-Pooh

53. Emma

54. Charlotte's Web

55. Wuthering Heights 56. The Iliad 57. On the Road

58. Remembrance of Things Past

59. Possession 60. Bleak House

61. His Dark Materials

62. Absalom, Absalom

63. The Ambassadors

64. To the Lighthouse

65. Mrs. Dalloway

66. Gone with the Wind

67. Atlas Shrugged