I recently finished reading "The Grapes of Wrath" and "The Pearl" by John Steinbeck. These two and many other Steinbeck books have a couple of things in common. The first thing is that they affect all poor people/families. The second thing is that in the end they are almost always terribly sad. The third thing they have in common is that I have a lot of fun. I've never read a John Steinbeck book that I didn't like, even though his books don't exactly cheer me up. "The Pearl" is about a poor man named Kino, his wife Juana and their child Coyotito. Kino is a pearl diver, but because there are so many other pearl divers where he lives, he very rarely finds precious pearls. At the beginning of the book, Coyotito is stung by a scorpion and becomes seriously ill. Because Kino and his family are very poor, they cannot afford to take Coyoti to a doctor. The next day, Kino finds a pearl beyond his wildest dreams. Word spreads throughout the city about Kino's extraordinary pearl, and the pearl buyers make a deal with each other to offer Kino very little for his pearl. The doctor, however, thought that Kino would soon have enough money to pay for his son's treatment, so he treated Coyotito. The next day, when Kino went to the city to sell his pearl, he refused to give it to the buyers for such a small amount of money. After some attempts by strangers to steal the pearl at night, Kino killed an intruder in his house during the night. They knew they had to escape and they did. They were extremely careful, but still couldn't evade the people who were looking for them. One night, while Kino was trying to get rid of the people who were hunting him, one of the "hunters" shot and killed Coyotito. The book ended like this. “The Grapes of Wrath” was a much longer book, again about a poor family during the Depression, the Joads. The Joads were an Oklahoma farming family before they were kicked off their land by the bank. Someone gave them a flyer telling them there was work in California, so they sold all their belongings to get enough money to buy an old, old, beat-up used car. Then Tom, dad, mom, Ruthie, Winfield,