East of Eden

It was easy for me to think of a piece of writing that illustrates what we have learned in our book this week. East of Eden has been one of favorite books since I read it when I was a teenager. John Steinbeck is an amazing writer but he went above and beyond with this book. He uses so much detail that it feels like you are in a scene from the book. Details can be overdone but he uses them smoothly. He uses a good rhythm when describing scenes in the story that it doesn’t make them overwhelming. The rhythm style he has takes his details and meshes them together. He uses imagery, varying sentence length, and repetition to really drive the story and keep you interested. 

East of Eden is a prime example of writing that has liveliness in it. Liveliness doesn’t mean that it is exciting or covered in exclamation points. Liveliness helps the reader to flow from paragraph to paragraph effortlessly. The language you use and what you are saying helps with liveliness. When I read East of Eden I don’t want to read the next paragraph because I am dying to know what happened. I just can’t stop reading because it all flows so nicely together and I don’t want to break up the parts of the story. 

Excerpt from East of Eden

"I remember that the Gabilan Mountains to the east of the valley were light gay mountains full of sun and loveliness and a kind of invitation, so that you wanted to climb into their warm foothills almost as you want to climb into the lap of a beloved mother. They were beckoning mountains with a brown grass love. The Santa Lucias stood up against the sky to the west and kept the valley from the open sea, and they were dark and brooding—unfriendly and dangerous. I always found in myself a dread of west and a love of east. Where I ever got such an idea I cannot say, unless it could be that the morning came over the peaks of the Gabilans and the night drifted back from the ridges of the Santa Lucias. It may be that the birth and death of the day had some part in my feeling about the two ranges of mountains.

 From both sides of the valley little streams slipped out of the hill canyons and fell into the bed of the Salinas River. In the winter of wet years the streams ran full-freshet, and they swelled the river until sometimes it raged and boiled, bank full, and then it was a destroyer. The river tore the edges of the farm lands and washed whole acres down; it toppled barns and houses into itself, to go floating and bobbing away. It trapped cows and pigs and sheep and drowned them in its muddy brown water and carried them to the sea. Then when the late spring came, the river drew in from its edges and the sand banks appeared. And in the summer the river didn't run at all above ground. Some pools would be left in the deep swirl places under a high bank. The tules and grasses grew back, and willows straightened up with the flood debris in their upper branches. The Salinas was only a part-time river. The summer sun drove it underground. 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. You can boast about anything if it's all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast."


I was reading an article about the top places to travel on Yahoo. I was reading about the attractions in China but in the article they wrote "china" not capitalized twice in the article.