Samuel Hamilton, the grandfather of the narrator (whom we can assume to be Steinbeck himself), is an Irish immigrant who settles in the valley with his wife, Liza, and their nine children towards the end of the 19th century. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast. You can boast about anything if it’s all you have. It was not a fine river at all, but it was the only one we had and so we boasted about it-how dangerous it was in a wet winter and how dry it was in a dry summer. Right from the beginning, I knew I was going to like Steinbeck’s writing in this book. The novel opens with a description of the Salinas Valley in California. Anyway, none of that matters now, because I have finally read East of Eden and loved it! I’m not sure why I felt that way – maybe because I have memories of reading Steinbeck’s novella The Pearl at school and being unimpressed. East of Eden has been on my Classics Club list for years now and I’ve been resisting reading it for all this time, convinced that I wouldn’t like it. You would think that by now I would be a good judge of which books I would be likely to enjoy or not enjoy, wouldn’t you? Well, apparently not.
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