East of Eden

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good”.

A beautiful and at times heartbreaking story of good and evil and the shades in between, and how our choices ultimately make us who we are. I was getting tired of seeing posts of “Wow, I read East of Eden and was blown away!” on reddit and finally decided to take the plunge and dive headlong into the saga, and I'm a little ashamed to admit that I belong to the same category. This was a beautiful book and I don't want to read anything by Steinbeck for a long time - because I want to savor this age-old ripe wine and shine in the afterglow.

I love to fall asleep while reading a book, but this might be one of those rare books that made me apprehensive about the ordeal while at the same time getting me excited for what comes next (the other one would be “House of Leaves”). I used to dread reading it at night because I knew somewhere down the line, there would be a chapter on Cathy, and I would get nightmares of her evil doings after that. It sounds silly when I say it out loud, but in my eyes, that speaks for the brilliance of this book. The length of the book allows it to explore each and every character to its core and oftentimes lead to conversations that would make me close my kindle and just think about what I had just read. The most illuminating pick of all those interesting conversations would be the one where the father-figure-cum-servant of the house discusses “Timshel” with one of the characters.

“Thou mayest”

I think if I ever get a tattoo (which might not be too distant a future), Timshel would surely feature prominently on my skin.