East of Eden by John Steinbeck- Review

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

My rating: 4.5/5 Stars

Publisher: Viking Press (1952)

Length: 602 pgs

Format: Hardcover, checked out from my local library

Goodreads Synopsis: Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families – the Trasks and the Hamiltons – whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Adam Trask came to California from the East to farm and raise his family on the new, rich land. But the birth of his twins, Cal and Aron, brings his wife to the brink of madness, and Adam is left alone to raise his boys to manhood. One boy thrives, nurtured by the love of all those around him; the other grows up in loneliness, enveloped by a mysterious darkness.

My Review:

This book and I had a journey. It had been recommended to me multiple times as one of the best books ever, but my not so great experience with Of Mice and Men had me weary of picking up another Steinbeck piece. This semester I happened to be doing an independent study course on The Bible as Literature, and for my final paper I could write on any topic I wanted, so I wanted to include a more modern (modern in comparison with the Bible) piece of literature to see how the female figure of Eve was interpreted. I was intimidated at an additional 600 pages of reading to do for school, but by the end of the novel I was flying through the pages and once it was over I almost felt empty, as Steinbeck did a magnificent job at creating characters who were so very real.

I think that the real strength of Steinbeck’s writing is his ability to write generations worth (literally) of fleshed out characters. Even the peripheral characters who played any sort of role had a history and a sense of realness about them, and it was impossible not to feel any empathy for them (even Cathy, who is downright frightening). By the end of the 600 pages in this novel the reader has literally felt as though they’ve experienced the trials and accomplishments of each and every family. Most interestingly, Steinbeck writes himself into the novel as the narrator and a severely minor character, the son of the daughter of a main character. This narration technique is interesting, because it calls into question how reliable the voyeuristic retelling of a character of miniscule importance is.

Steinbeck also tackles multiple heavy issues that are huge questions that impact the human condition, such as: can a human be inherently good or inherently evil? Can humans ever overcome the death of a loved one? What is the implication of choice rather than command? Are some characters truly unredeemable? What happens when we fall in love with our idea of a person rather than that person’s reality? He expertly weaves the tale of Eden and Cain and Abel into the narrative synthesizing it with the events of the late 1800s into the early 1900’s, such as World War I, the settling of the California Central Valley, and the increase of technology such as the shift to automobiles. Steinbeck has clearly done his biblical research as well, as his writing shows not only an influence of the Hebrew Scriptures, but actual debate, mainly through Lee and Sam Hamilton, as to what kind of truth the Bible holds, and how translation has colored interpretation of the narrative (at one point they actually argue the meaning of the Hebrew word timshel, and I was jumping up and down because it’s exactly the type of thing I would do in one of my religious studies classes). Steinbeck takes a hugely important Christian narrative and manages to be influenced by it while also critiquing it as well.

The reason this book didn’t get a full five star rating from me was because of the gender based interpretation of the story of Genesis that painted the “Eve” based character as one of the most evil, apathetic, and salacious characters of all time. While she was so horrifying that it was impossible to stop reading, this misappropriation of Eve’s role in the Bible and in the Abrahamic traditions is one that I don’t subscribe to as it sets the foundation for sexism and the view that women are inherently inferior, weak, and impulse-driven, and who need to be controlled lest they spread evil throughout the world (and my paper will use this character to depict how the Eve character is stigmatized in literature). Steinbeck does slightly redeem himself by creating a character, Abra, later on who is an opinionated female who doesn’t pretend to hide her flaws unlike some of the holier-than-thou male characters. *End Rant*

Favorite Characters:

Sam Hamilton– I’ve never read a character who radiated so much pure joy and enjoyment for life, learning, and asking questions in order to achieve knowledge. If I could choose any literary character to be my dad or grandpa, it would be Sam Hamilton.

Lee- A character who displays the struggle of Chinese-Americans and the stigmas they faced in developing California as a minority exploited for labor, Lee is one of the wisest characters who has a gift for pointing out uncomfortable truths, such as that it’s easier on the majority population to think minorities are inferior to them then to acknowledge the intelligence of an outside group. Plus, he’s often really hilarious in a really intelligent way, and comes to be a true part of Adam’s family.

Cal- I don’t know if the reader is supposed to walk away liking Cal, but I really did. He’s the character who was perhaps the most real depiction of the human condition, as he struggles with both goodness and darkness inside of him and acknowledges both sides of himself, and that he has control over himself, rather than letting his heritage define him.

This book also had some phenomenal quotes:

“When a child first catches adults out- when it first walks into into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgements are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.” (Steinbeck 20)

“It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can know a thing and still not believe it.” (Steinbeck 452)

Overall Thoughts:

East of Eden is a phenomenal read and Steinbeck has a truly timeless and uncanny insight into the truths about the human condition (if you need proof, see the quotes above). While it’s a long read, it’s worth it, and you’ll walk away with that feeling of profound knowledge when you’ve read a book that will stick with you for the rest of forever.

Free Yourself: The Pressure to Be “Well Read” and Why It Shouldn’t Matter

I’ll let you in on a secret.

I’ve never felt that I’ve been “well read” enough to be an English major.

Let’s face it- English majors are often literary elitists. They scoff at reading King Lear or The Wife of Bath in Brit Lit 201 because they’ve already done in it high school. They line up to take that voluntary Shakespeare class. They’ll respond to something that happens with the phrase “Oh, that’s very (enter author’s name here).”

It’s intimidating, and often discouraging, when you’re the only one who has to read The Great Gatsby sophomore year of college in a single night because everyone else had to pick it up in high school (and in eleventh grade I was saddled with an English teacher who blatantly ignored the required reading list). Four years after choosing my major I’m writing my senior thesis on Harry Potter, and I still get the occasional scoffs and eye-rolls, because what I’m working with is “not real literature.” There’s a real anxiety when older people ask who my favorite authors are and I just think they’re not going to understand when I say Rowling, Rowell, Clare, and Armentrout.

After expressing my hidden concerns to my very professor that is overseeing my senior thesis and who has never read Harry Potter, she advised me that I really needed to “free myself” from the social anxiety and stigma of how much canonical literature I’ve read. She said even among faculty and PhD students the elitism is there, but that it is often not a reflection of the intellectual level, or academic performance, of most people. Who gets to decide what’s in the canon anyways? And why is there such stigma about what can be added? Why is there such as fear of children’s literature that it’s now given its own awards and lists so that it doesn’t compete with other literature? And how can reading contemporary be any less valid than classical, when one day contemporary texts may very well be “canonical?”

It’s not that I detest literature from the canon. In fact, I’m reading a Steinbeck novel right now and really enjoying it. It’s that I’ve always gravitated toward reading things that interested me, and that I could relate to, rather than reading so that I can brag about my extensive experience with classical literature. I’m so tired of arbitrary lists that deem “100 Best Books of All Time” by whose standards my literary experience are measured against. Reading canonical books did not foster my love for reading, rather reading the books that caught my eye and absorbed me more than any form of film or music could is what made me a voracious reader. And maybe for some people those books were Catcher in the Rye and Romeo and Juliet, but for me they were Harry Potter, The Princess Diaries, and Walk Two Moons. And now in my spare time I want to indulge in books of my preferred genre (YA and Adult fiction) rather than trying to achieve some intangible status of being “well read” because of how many books I’ve read off of a certain list.

Am I the only one who feels this way? I think that being “well read” is an extremely subjective term and I’d say I’d base it off of the amount of texts and the amount of engagement individuals have with those texts, rather than what those texts are. What do you think the term “well read” means? Have you ever faced social or academic stigma because of what you’ve read? Do you find yourself pushing to read more “classical literature,” or is your TBR list determined by your own whims and preferences? Do you think there should be more variation in the books students read in school? Let me know in the comments- I think these are important questions that merit important discussions!

Oxford: A History of Children’s Literature

While on my travel course last month, I was able to take a day trip from London to Oxford. While the primary attraction in Oxford was the two hour Harry Potter Walking tour, we also had five hours of free time to wander the quaint, beautiful area. What we came to learn was that Oxford has a history of Children’s Fantasy Literature, from C.S. Lewis to Lewis Carrol to one of the largest bookstores in the UK.

First up on the day’s agenda was Christ Church College (see above), notable for having many Harry Potter movie scenes filmed on its campus. Aside from the rewarding world though, the college has connections to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as Lewis Carrol is said to have been inspired to create the character of Alice after a little girl who resided at the college as her father worked at the school as an official.

Next up was lunch at the famous pub, “The Eagle and Child,” which has a history of attracting authors. Such is the case with Lewis Carrol and C.S. Lewis (author of the Chronicles of Narnia series) who would reportedly sit in the large back dining room and argue over manuscripts and discuss ideas. We got to have lunch in this historic room, and though pub food is not usually my first choice, they did have excellent chicken.

A good portion of the rest of the afternoon was spent wandering around, which inevitably led me to a bookshop (as usual). Blackwell’s is a huge bookstore in Oxford that originally started out so tiny that there was allegedly only room for the owner to hire one employee at a time, lest they be unable to move around the corner store. Over time it has expanded to become one of the largest bookstores in the UK, with multiple floors, a café and a subterranean level that encompasses thousands of books. Of course I headed straight to the YA and children’s literature section, and was delighted to find it was magnificently stocked. I completely freaked out over seeing all of the UK covers on my favorite titles, and could not help but burn with envy at how much prettier (I thought) they were than some of the US covers.

(Above, a bag that I will forever regret not buying).

Oxford was a storybook town that held a magical and ethereal feel the entire time we were there; it was unlike any other part of England we visited, and had it’s own magic and charm about it that I think I’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else in the world. Walking around the slippery streets, ancient clock towers and narrow alleyways, it’s easy to see how so many tales of fantasy were conceivedthere and how JK Rowling’s tales of the wizarding world add to the already rich tradition of Oxford’s relationship with children’s fantasy literature.

And now, some more pictures, because they’re too pretty not to share:

If you’re interested in learning more about Blackwell’s, click here.

Summer Reading Series 2013: Boundless

Boundless by Cynthia Hand
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

(3.5 out of 5 stars)

I had this book waiting on my desk to read for a while, thinking, this will be a fantastic, enjoyable read, no problem. I had read the two previous novels in the series and had really liked them (as I’ve mentioned before, I’m a total sucker for angel/fallen angel books). And while this book does deliver at the ends, the first half was a real slough to get through.

Since the first half of the book was relatively disappointing (at least for the standards I had for this series) and the second half was much more interesting, I will break my review into two parts:

The Bad: I literally thought the beginning of the book was a dream sequence or something, because in what world do literally almost all of the same group of friends go to the same college and move their little circle perfectly to Stanford? Yes, maybe I’m being too harsh- they’re all following their intertwined “purpose” and whatnot- but it was so cliché I could barely read it. And reading all about Clara going to classes and experiencing college, etc., felt like a really displaced, jarring aspect of the narrative. Not that it’s not a valid experience to explore but because this is the third book in a series and yet it felt like the first, with Clara being so innocent and having so many new experiences when it’s like hello, you have so many other major things going on, so many loose ends from the previous books. ALSO, a MAJOR pet peeve of mine was that it mentions one of the characters going to school in California at UC Santa Clara.

….

As a native Californian I wanted to pull my hair out reading this. There is a Santa Clara University which is a private, Jesuit, catholic university but it is in NO WAY part of the University of California public school system along with Berkeley, UCLA, etc. I was super disappointed by this oversight considering the author herself is a professor at Pepperdine University, which is also in California, and I don’t understand how this oversight possibly occurred. It really feels like lazy editing.

There was also some cheesy and really random time travel that went on but I won’t elaborate for those who haven’t read it yet.

The Good: About halfway through, when winter break hits, things start to pick up. The author did a really good job incorporating everyone’s purpose into the plot and entwining them all together. I also didn’t think the author would kill off characters but it happened more than I expected, and I appreciate an author who is willing to take risks and sacrifice their characters. I like how their is a distinction between true “fallen” angels who are aligned with hell and those who are in the in-between space like Phen, whose allegiance is tricky. And though it’s not new to this book in particular I loved loved loved the idea that the fallen (like Samjeeza) carry around this crippling Sorrow that literally radiates off of them, and is usually concentrated to one particular person/incident/experience. It’s a new take on the fallen angel theme and I always appreciate when an author brings something original to the table.

This is a potential spoiler, though I would consider it minor, but I really loved the following dialogue exchange regarding the concept of hell in this series:
“Not trapped but kept. Most of them do not realize they’re in hell. They have willed themselves here. They could leave at any time they choose, but they will never choose to.”
“Why not?”
“Because they will not let go of what it is that brought them here to begin with.” –Boundless, 369

This is the most interesting notion of hell I have come across so far- that it’s completely self-inflicted. It’s a horrifying thought, but it makes sense with a frightening clarity, that we, as humans, damn ourselves. I thought this was a delightfully insightful aspect of the book.

The novel also sees a lot of character development, especially with Christian, which I appreciated because we’ve already seen so much with Tucker. The author did a great job evening out the playing field and developing both love interests well enough that I would have been upset no matter who Clara ended up with, and making two likeable male protagonists is definitely nothing to sneeze at.

Overall I’m glad I didn’t give up on this book the way I wanted too after the first 100 pages or so. The tediousness of the first half is definitely made up by a ton of action in the second half, with multiple plot twists that aren’t at all obvious, and multiple climactic moments- literally you think you’ve hit the climax of the plot and then it just gets topped again throughout the last 50 pages. This book is a sufficient end to a good series and doesn’t leave the reader with a lingering feeling of having wanted more than they were given.

Good if you’re looking for: A look at actual angels as well as fallen angels, a convincing love triangle, a California and or/Wyoming setting, an action-packed ending to a trilogy

Also, does anyone else love Samjeeza as much as I do?

“A smelly bone like that, better off buried in the backyard of your life.”

This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz

Summer Reading Series 2013: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There’s so much to say about this book it’s hard to know where to begin, or where to end for that matter. I never read this book in high school, though it would ironically always be that one book that people claimed to have read (by choice) and loved, often times it seemed for the sake of having “read” it, almost as a status symbol. Having read this for the first time in my later college years, I definitely see how much of the issues dealt with in this book can go over the heads of high schoolers, even intelligent ones. Yet that’s what’s so fascinating about this book; it has layers of reading. You can bet that this is a book that can be read multiple times and each time something new will stand out, make sense, or speak to the reader.

First off, I love Charlie as a narrative. His naiveté may bother some, but I think it makes him an honest narrator, as honest as he can be with his own biases. The format of the novel makes it seem as though each letter is addressed directly to the reader, the ambiguity of who Charlie is writing too makes the reader feel all that more connected to the plot and characters. This book deals with topics that range from mental illness, drug abuse, underage everything, gender and sexuality, mental, physical, and sexual abuse, and more. I’ve heard critiques of this book with people thinking it is unrealistic that so many issues could be encountered by one kid, but with the alarming statistics about how rampant these problems are in the US, it’s really not that surprising at all. Especially when one is a wallflower like Charlie, these multitudes of underlying issues are recognized by those who are quiet observers.

What really strikes me about this book is its timelessness. It was written in 1999, 14 years prior to when I am reading it today, and it takes place in 1991, over 20 years ago, well before the advent of so many things crucial to the young adult experience today, such as social media, a trending and increasing focus on social justice, the increasing awareness of teen depression, anxiety, and suicide, etc. Yet this book still hits the core of the trials of young adulthood flawlessly and honestly, proving that while knowledge, trends, and methods of communication change the teenage experience will always deal with struggle, acceptance, self-awareness, sexuality, trauma, learning tolerance, and learning one’s own potentials and weaknesses. I’m sure I can read this book another 10 years from now and still find it poignant and insightful. That’s another great aspect of the narrative; even if you’re no longer of the high school age, it serves as a tool of reflection and insight of your own experiences at that age.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower deserved every single star in my five-star review. Some may say there is no such thing as perfection, but this may well be as close as it gets. It has a way of sticking to you as a reader, resonating on a deeper emotional and intellectual level than most texts ever will. It is hauntingly honest, almost necessarily brutal in it’s portrayal of the experience of young adults. It’s unlike anything I have read, and if you’re to read just one book from the YA fiction genre, I say with full conviction that it should be this one. It’s a book that gives back to the reader as much as it takes.

Recommended for: Everyone, high school ages and up, especially readers in their twenties who will find this text poignant and reflective.

You can never be overdressed or over educated – Oscar Wilde