And yet, this book, along with The Count of Monte Cristo, Grapes of Wrath, and quite a number of other tomes are assigned in high schools by teachers/school districts. Those educators think they are providing some kind of service by trying to force feed young people books that cannot really be understood in a meaningful way by the vast majority of people with ~15 years of life.

It wasn't until a decade after college that I picked up another Steinbeck novel. and after finishing Cannery Row, the only question i could ask myself was, WTF were my teachers thinking assigning Grapes of Wrath vs some of his much shorter, less complex works that could be read in a couple days. The whole book is shorter than the section of Grapes that most people describe as being the slog you have to get through to enjoy the rest of the novel.

I read a lot, and I can say with a fair bit of confidence the one long lasting result of assigning these books in HS is to guarantee most people have a life long repulsion for long "classics".