East of Eden

The purpose of this blog is not exclusively to recommend books for classroom use.  If it were, this book would have absolutely no place here. 

The first thing I have to say about East of Eden is that it's very Steinbeck-y.  Steinbeck, in my experience, has a tendency to ramble at times and get a little tangential.  He also takes his sweet time to tell a story.  This book is no exception.  That's not necessarily a problem for me, it's just something you need to know to expect if you're reading Steinbeck.

Moving on, this was a good book.  It was in no way what I expected.  To be honest, I thought it was the traditional story of the Garden of Eden just told with a little different perspective.  Spoiler alert: it's not.  There are definitely elements and motifs of that age-old happening in this story (in my view repeated at least twice), but the story stands alone.  It's not the story of Cain and Abel or Adam and Eve.  It's the story of Cathy/Kate, Adam, Lee, Cal, Aron, Samuel (my favorite), and the rest.

I love young adult literature.  That's probably obvious by the content I post about on this blog.  While reading East of Eden, however, I felt something urging me toward adult literature more often.  Maybe it's just this particular book or maybe it's just Steinbeck, but reading something so dense and concentrated was great.  The language, though wandering at times, was delicious to me.  I suppose that sounds peculiar to describe language as delicious, but it was.  I'm all for the simplicity of young adult literature, but the richness of these words was noticeably more so.

I'll stop rambling.  You all know this book is a classic.  I'm not into reading the classics just for the sake of reading the classics (you'll probably never catch me reading Dickens ever again in my life), but I really do recommend this one.  Once you get past the jolting jump between characters and plots lines at the beginning and really into the heart of this slow-paced story, you'll be sucked in.