Sir Steinbeck

Busy weekend, lot of running around, doing errands, cleaning the house, running Little One here and there, hosting my father-in-law. Watched the football games, watched my oldest practice her basketball game. Put away close to a hundred pages of The Two Towers.

But the highlight for me was scoring a rare book. Go figure!

Me and the two little ones were zipping through Barnes & Noble, searching for a birthday gift for Grandpa, the third of about six errands we needed to do Saturday morning. Now, I never let a B&N visit go to waste, so we detoured to the SF-Fantasy used paperback section. Since I’ve been re-reading Tolkien, I’ve had a notion to read some Mary Stewart, she of the Crystal Cave-Hollow Hills Arthurian updates that we all had to read as part of our high school summer reading programs, if you went to high school in the early 80s.

I remembered seeing used hardcover books of hers there, so I bribed the younglings with some chocolate milk and proceeded to scour the shelves. No luck. Then, something caught my eye, something I had been aware of only vaguely at some point (it was on my Acquisitions List an unknown time ago): The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by none other than … John Steinbeck.

The fact that Steinbeck wrote his take on the Arthurian legend somehow strikes me as must-read. I know nothing of the book or how it was received half-a-century ago. I’m not much versed on Steinbeck, either, except for reading In Dubious Battle, twice. Despite the fact that the politics of the book are 180 degrees of mine, I absolutely and enthusiastically love that novel, back when I first read it in high school as well as a re-read some seven or eight years back.

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Arthur and his knights for most of my life. As a kid I loved that movie Excalibur. As an adult I bought the DVD for a re-watch and hated it. I loved my first read of T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, but a subsequent reading was intolerable. I enjoy Tennyson’s Idylls of the King but have never been able to read through the whole thing. Go figure!

So, I snatched up Steinbeck’s book, debited the $2.70, and excitedly put it on its proper spot on the shelf behind me as I type this, the on-deck circle, upon which twenty-eight books currently sit. But I’ll bump it up a bit in the rotation. Maybe you’ll be reading a review of it, here at the Hopper, some time early fall …