I read East of Eden in the midst of a very tough semester of college. I was neck-deep in art history, which meant endlessly memorizing and regurgitating artwork identifications for slide exams, and although it was hardly the most responsible use of my free time, I decided to start reading for pure pleasure, and East of Eden was the perfect escape because it had absolutely nothing to do with anything I was studying.

Everyone reads The Grapes of Wrath at some point, and East of Eden shares plenty in common with Steinbeck's other big novel, but I found it to be a much more enjoyable reading experience. It certainly benefits from not being foisted on anyone in high school, but also it seemed to me to be the more mature of the two novels. Both novels play around with morality but East of Eden has truly sympathetic characters. The Grapes of Wrath presents morally ambiguous characters that are difficult to love or admire, and that is the whole point; East of Eden, however, deals more in archetypes, in this case Biblical archetypes, and the results are clearly-drawn divisions between "good" characters and "bad" characters. But this never veers in an oversimplification of human morality, and the results are emotionally compelling and endlessly readable. I definitely had a reading phase of enjoying epic familial/generational novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude or Middlesex, and East of Eden fits very comfortably in that group. If you haven't yet, do yourself the favor of checking out Steinbeck's lesser-read novels.

The Bookhive List is a weekly recommendation of my all-time favorite, must-read books.