East of Eden
John Steinbeck
36 people recommended it in 23 threads, 2011–2024.
What people on Hacker News said
East of Eden by Steinbeck really changed my college mindset on what it means to be "good" and "evil", "right" and "wrong".
It is dripping with Biblical imagery, and Steinbeck's prose is rambling and tangential for some (though poetic for me), and his characters are not "realistic" and larger than life (but that's what makes them pop off the page for me and so memorable.
East of Eden is Steinbeck, of whom I'm usually not a fan, but it was phenomenal and definitely made me rethink my approach to life (it was high school, so this was easier to do, but it's still a nice feature in a book).
East of Eden: My wife's favorite book and is now one of my favorites.
Overall though, my absolute top tier books are East of Eden, Catch-22, and My Struggle (Knausgaard). 1000% read those.
On the non-fiction front I'm reading Big Data by Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Both interesting and compelling in their own ways.
If you like Steinbeck, try "East of Eden". For me it was his best.
Where it comes up
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