East of Eden is about six hundred pages long, covers three generations of two families across fifty years in the Salinas Valley, and asks you to keep track of a cast that grows steadily until the last hundred pages. Steinbeck considered it the book everything else had been practice for. It is also, for a great many readers, the long novel they started with real enthusiasm in January and abandoned somewhere in the middle without ever deciding to. That is almost never a failure of attention. It is a failure of approach, and long books reward a slightly different approach than short ones.
Start by accepting the timescale honestly. At a realistic thirty pages an evening this is a three week book, and at the more common ten or fifteen pages before sleep it is closer to two months. Readers get into trouble by silently budgeting a fortnight and then treating week three as evidence that they are failing. Nothing has gone wrong at week three. Decide at the outset that this book will occupy a season of your reading rather than a slot in it, and the pressure that makes people quit long novels simply does not build in the first place.
Read it in chapters rather than in minutes. Steinbeck's chapters are short and they end where a thought ends, which makes them the natural unit here. Stopping mid-chapter because you have hit twenty minutes leaves you with nothing to hold, so the next evening starts with a reconstruction rather than a continuation, and it is that nightly reconstruction cost that eventually makes a long book feel exhausting. Finish the chapter, even if it takes five extra minutes. You will come back to the next one carrying something whole.
Keep a cast list, and start it earlier than you think you need to. This is the single most useful thing you can do for this particular novel, because Steinbeck is deliberately playing with repetition. The Trask brothers are Charles and Adam; a generation later Adam's sons are Cal and Aron. Two families run in parallel, the Trasks who are invented and the Hamiltons who were Steinbeck's own mother's people, and the Hamilton children arrive in a rush. Six names on the inside cover with a phrase each will save you twenty backward flicks, and the flicks are what break the spell.
Expect a middle that tests you and know what it is doing. Roughly a third of the way in, the book slows and darkens considerably around Cathy, and a lot of readers stall there. It is worth knowing in advance that this is intentional rather than a sag: Steinbeck is establishing the thing the rest of the novel will argue against, and the payoff is a long way downstream. If you are going to give the book a fixed number of pages before deciding, make that number generous enough to reach the conversation about timshel, because the novel does not fully declare itself until then.
Note the moment the book states its own subject. There is a scene in which Lee, the Trask housekeeper and the most interesting man in the book, explains what he learned from a group of scholars about a single word in the story of Cain and Abel. The word is timshel, and the argument is over whether it means thou shalt or thou must or thou mayest. Steinbeck lands on thou mayest, and the whole novel is built on that choice. If you write down only one page reference while reading, make it that one. Everything before it reads differently once you have it, and everything after it is a demonstration of it.
Log where you are as you go, not only when you finish. A long book is the case where progress notes earn their keep. In Chaptra you can keep East of Eden as currently reading and add progress entries against it with the page you have reached and a line about what just happened, which does two things: it gives you a thirty second way back into the book after a gap, and it leaves you a record of a two month read that would otherwise compress into a single vague memory. Books you spend a season with deserve more than one entry.
Give yourself permission to read something else alongside it. There is a persistent idea that a serious book demands exclusivity, and for long novels it is usually wrong. The realistic alternative to a shorter book on the side is not a faster read of East of Eden; it is three weeks of reading nothing, because you did not feel up to the big one and had ruled out anything smaller. Keep a lighter book available for the tired evenings. The long novel is more likely to survive the month if it is not carrying the whole weight of your reading life.
Read the family names as a structure rather than a puzzle. The initials repeat on purpose, generation after generation, and once you see that the C and A pattern is the Cain and Abel story running again with different people in the parts, the size of the cast stops being an obstacle. You are not being asked to memorise a genealogy. You are being asked to notice a shape recurring, which is the point of the book, and which is much easier to hold in your head than a list of who is related to whom.
Do not read it in a rush before a deadline. Book clubs sometimes schedule this one in a month and it is the wrong container. Steinbeck wrote it slowly and deliberately, writing letters to his editor each morning to warm up before starting the day's pages, and those letters were later published as a book of their own. The novel has that unhurried quality all through it, and reading it against the clock strips out exactly what makes it worth the six hundred pages. If a group is reading it together, split it over two meetings rather than compressing it into one.
Write something down when you finish, on the same evening. Long books have a particular problem: the ending arrives after so many weeks that the beginning has faded, and if you close the cover and move on, what you retain a year later is a mood rather than a book. Ten minutes that night, spent on what changed between the first Adam and the last, or on whether you accepted the ending, is what turns two months of reading into something you still have. Finish entries are cheap to write and they are the difference between having read a book and being able to say anything about it.
East of Eden is not a difficult book. Its sentences are plain and its story is gripping. It is only a long one, and long books fail for logistical reasons rather than intellectual ones. Plan for a season rather than a fortnight, read in whole chapters, keep six names written down, push through the dark middle to the timshel conversation, log your progress so the gaps do not cost you, and keep something lighter at hand for the evenings when you have nothing left. Do that and it is one of the most companionable long novels in American fiction, which is exactly what people are describing when they say it stayed with them for years.