When I began reading this book I was reminded of [b:Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance|629|Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance An Inquiry Into Values|Robert M. Pirsig|http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1410136019s/629.jpg|175720]. It's the same genre -- travel with a lot of philosophical musing thrown in.

Most of the book is a description of a voyage to the Gulf of California. John Steinbeck's friend Ed Ricketts was a marine biologist, and they chartered a fishing boat to collect specimens of marine invertebrates. There is an appendix, Steinbeck's memoir of his friend Ed Rickett's.

I found it interesting because it's a part of the world I knew nothing about, and after reading the book I know a little more, at least about what it was like 70-odd years ago. And in the process I learnt something about marine biology; most of what I knew about that was from bed-time stories my father read me when I was 3 or 4 years old from his biology text books. Who needs extra-terrestrial monsters when you can have a sea urchin? That caused me problems in my later reading when I came across descriptions of children as urchins -- were they all spiny?

As for the philosophy, I'm not sure if I understood it all. I think Steinbeck was coming from a completely different place, with different assumptions. He seemed to be anti-teleology, and to think that there is too much teleology in the world, but he seemed to see it in a quite different context.

Some of his comments were interesting, but some seemed to make little sense.