I hated reading until I was 15 years old. I avoided it like the plague, instead focusing my time on guitar, baseball and television. When I was unlucky enough to be assigned a book report, I used Sparknotes and Wikipedia to shamelessly churn out a B minus quality paper. To the English teachers that had to read these: I am sorry.
This all changed between my sophomore and junior year of high school when I was assigned Steinbeck's "East of Eden" for summer reading. Normally, I would disregard such an assignment until the final days of August, then write a half-assed essay that was part author biography part plot summary. That summer however my mother had something else in mind.
We had two family trips planned. In June, we were to drive eight hours to visit my brother and his wife in upstate New York. Then, in August, we would fly to California where I would play in an invitation only baseball camp at Stanford University. The camp was the most important sporting event of my young life and had the potential of earning me a scholarship to a major college program. While my father and I imagined visions of grandeur at the camp, my mother found a way to connect the two trips with my summer reading assignment.
East of Eden, she noticed, took place about an hour from Stanford. As a family, we could listen to the Audio Book during our drive to New York and back, then when we went out west, we could visit Steinbeck's home and the surrounding area. My father and I agreed and by the time we had returned from New York, we'd listened to two-thirds of the 700-page, 1952 novel.
I still wasn't hooked. It's not that I found the book boring, I just found other things more pressing. Plus, I was old enough to understand the idea of a sunk cost. So what if I'd spent hours listening to the book? That didn't mean there was any inherent benefit in finishing it now, especially if I could spend that time preparing for the camp at Stanford. So that's what I did, I put the book off and practiced my pitching motion until I was sore every day.
But by some miracle, I forget to charge my phone for the flight to San Francisco and the airline didn't offer a movie. Unable to sleep on planes, I read the remaining chapters of Steinbeck's masterpiece as we traversed the North American continent. If you haven't read the book, I won't spoil anything beyond saying that its ending makes it one of the most powerful and well thought-out pieces of literature ever written. By the time we landed in California, I was changed. I was focused more on visiting Steinbeck's home than I was with performing at the baseball camp.
I have been a voracious reader ever since. I went on to study Spanish literature in college and I don't leave my house without my kindle or an audio book. I've worked through many of the 'great' writers and classics, yet no single book has impacted like East of Eden. Few come close, but none are equal.
Some psychologist might say that the reason I feel so strongly about this book has to do with context with which I read it. Between visiting my brother and sharing the trip with my parents, surely, there are some familial elements tied up with this book for me. For many years, I worried this was the case and avoided revisiting the book. I didn't want to spoil what I remembered it to be.
This summer, fifteen years after my initial reading, I read it cover to cover over a six-day period. My fears were unjustified. The book is still as impactful as it was when I was 15.