The Bookhive List: 'East of Eden' by John Steinbeck

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.

The Bookhive List: 'Middlesex' by Jeffrey Eugenides

There have been many posts on The Bookhive List, and there will be many more, but if I had to narrow it down to a top-five type situation, Middlesex would sit comfortably on that list.  It is the essential novel in my life. The prose is lyrical and beautiful, the structure is complex and rewarding, and the characters are so alive.

As if that weren't enough of a good reason to love and admire it, the bulk of the novel takes place in Detroit and Grosse Pointe, my hometown. I live only a few blocks from Middlesex (the street), I was married in the chapel at the girls' school attended by Cal, and perhaps most importantly and most ephemerally, I understand Eugenides' obsession with the place. To outsiders, it's a wealthy suburb of Detroit (a totally shallow mis-characterization, by the way); to me, and apparently to Eugenides as well, it's an incredibly magical place that is utterly haunted by its own history. It's a place that demands narrative -- I always joke that someday I'll write my "Grosse Pointe novel," if only because there are so many incredible stories and characters in this place.

Eugenides has unfairly been the focus of feminist criticism of the publishing industry -- critics have argued that if his books were written by women, they wouldn't get the same positive/academic attention, and that's possibly true. But even so, I'm not going to begrudge a male author for writing the female perspective so skillfully -- I will take Eugenides over John Updike, Philip Roth, or Jonathon Franzen any day. His ability to play with gender and to write simultaneously gendered and ambiguous perspectives is masterful, and the obvious influence of Jane Austen on his writing is endearing.

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