maybe timshel will be our always

“There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.”

steinbeck said that everything he wrote prior to this book was just practice. which means everything i have read prior to this book was also practice, familiarising myself with stories about humanity, until i could fully appreciate just how perfectly this encapsulates human nature and everything that comes with it. the good. the evil. the freedom of choice. the resulting consequences. the loneliness. the beauty. there are so many inspired nuggets of wisdom nestled into this deeply intimate story...

This was... something.

*It made it to my best books of 2022: https://youtu.be/WmTndjsYFIc

welcome to...(MAY)ST OF EDEN!!this might sound like my month/title puns are getting worse and worse, but wait until we get to the reveal on this one.by being excited i have definitely cursed myself into forgetting to do it.every month, elle and i read an intimidating classic in a couple chapters a day all month long. MIDDLEMARCH MARCH was a raging success, but TENANT OF WILDAPRIL HALL sucked hard.to heal ourselves, we're revisiting a book we know we love. we're also doing it with our book club!c...

Very easy for me to rate this book 5 stars. It is amazing. There is so much in it and it is not hard to read. It just tells it like it is and does it so well.It is like a high priced, high quality buffet with lots of different stations. At each of those stations is a main table with an awesome featured food (thick cut prime rib, chocolate fondue fountain, Mongolian BBQ bowl, etc.). In layman's terms, there is SO MUCH awesome story here with a HUGE payoff every 50 pages or so. I am very satisfied...

One of the most appropriate epithets that apply to this novel is ‘monumental’. Indeed East of Eden stands as a monument to the entire epoch and those people that lived in those troubled days. This is a chronicle of generations – of parents and children.When a child first catches adults out – when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just – his world falls into panic de...

“All great and precious things are lonely.” Such an amazing book. An instant all time favourite.I'm sure you've heard of this book. Often touted as one of the "greatest novels of all time" or "books you must read before you die". For some reason, I've been putting it off. Maybe because I was made to study Of Mice and Men to death in school, or maybe because I thought The Grapes of Wrath was a little overrated. But I've been missing out.A closer look should have told me that. Because I love fa...

I hate this book. Hate. Ponderous, pretentious, melodramatic, self-satisfied, patronizing to its readers, with ultimately nothing to say. Can be summarized thus: a bunch of people with no formal education whatsoever sit around discussing the time they read the Old Testament in Hebrew. They then tell us all how to live. Uh...right. I knew we were in trouble with the unbelievably lame introduction -- some forced, self-congratulatory metaphor about a box, if memory serves -- but it's hard to believ...

This book is mind blowing. It is John Steinbeck at his sharpest. He said that every author really only has one "book," and that all of his books leading up to East of Eden were just practice--Eden would be his book. I could write a summary of the book, but it would be more trouble than it's worth. You will often hear it referred to as a "modern retelling of the Genesis story of Cain and Abel" but that is too simplistic. Steinbeck takes the story of Cain and Abel and makes Cain (in the form of Ca...