for 52 books in 52 weeks. I was actually pretty surprised by this one, I had always heard it was about the horrors of the meat packing industry, but it really is so much more than that. The book follows the story of a Lithuanian named Jurgis and the rest of his immigrant family through their trials of trying to survive during the early 1900s in Chicago. They seemed to have problems at every turn, and were tricked many times by people who promised to help them in someway or another. I did have a few issues with this book though, many of Sinclair's characters seemed rather flat, such as Ona, Elizabeta, and Marija. I know the story is supposed to be mainly about Jurgis, but I do wish the others would have had a bit more personality. I did find the actual bits about the meat packing process to be horrifying. Hearing that they used sickly animals as well as continuing to run the grinding machinery even if a worker fell in and was crushed shouldn't have surprised me all that much, but it did. I know things were bad for everybody back in those days, but the amount of filth and sickness was astounding to me. I wasn't fond of the end of the book with all the socialism rallying and events. It isn't that I have issues with the ideas of socialism, I just found it to be terribly boring and really didn't move the story along, but it made sense for Sinclair to put it there since the book was originally published as a serialized novel in a socialist newspaper. It is also interesting to note that this book caused the creation of the FDA.
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