The Great Gatsby in Pick-a-Shelf

Feb 17, 2008 D.G. rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, re-read, reviewed, classics

**Re-read May 2013**

The Great Gatsby is a masterpiece that chronicles the rise and fall of a man, during the excesses of the Roaring Twenties, the decade of Jazz and Prohibition. I read it for the first time 5 years ago and loved it, so I was ecstatic a the idea of reading it again. I鈥檝e never read a book that managed such vivid descriptions with such sparse language.

The Great Gatsby is a book with no heroes. All the characters are flawed and some of them are particularly horrible. For all his **Re-read May 2013**

The Great Gatsby is a masterpiece that chronicles the rise and fall of a man, during the excesses of the Roaring Twenties, the decade of Jazz and Prohibition. I read it for the first time 5 years ago and loved it, so I was ecstatic a the idea of reading it again. I鈥檝e never read a book that managed such vivid descriptions with such sparse language.

The Great Gatsby is a book with no heroes. All the characters are flawed and some of them are particularly horrible. For all his worldliness and money, Gatsby is a charming fool with a boyish idea of himself who got caught up in the idea of love and couldn鈥檛 let it go. Nick has ghosts of his own so he contented himself with being the observer and became Gatsby鈥檚 friend when it was already too late. Tom and Daisy were the worst of them all:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy 鈥� they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was the kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made鈥�

Even though you may not care much for any of the characters, the story pulls you in until you want to know them all. There鈥檚 a certain melancholia about the narrative that warns you this is not a a love story gone wrong but something even worse: the terrible despair of lost dreams and the reality that sometimes, the villains get away with murder.

The descriptions of New York are timeless and they are still so true that as a New Yorker, I felt them deep in my heart. It鈥檚 as if Mr. Fitzgerald described something I always knew about the City but never could put into words:

The city seen from the Queenboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

If you read The Great Gatsby in high school but didn鈥檛 like it, I recommend you to give it another try as a an adult. It鈥檚 the kind of book that you may enjoy with the perspective of time and it鈥檚 simply so beautifully written that it deserves a second chance.

Check out this review and others at ...more

15 likes · Like · see review

Aug 23, 2008 Luann rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: adult, fiction, classics, 2009, american-history

This is another classic that I'm glad to have finally read even though I didn't particularly enjoy it. Now I won't have to feel like I'm missing out when people talk about this book. It just isn't a very pleasant story, and I didn't care about any of the characters - even the narrator. It does contain some elegant writing, but that isn't enough to make me like it. I'm not sorry that I read it, but I'm glad that I won't ever have to read it again. ...more

4 likes · Like · see review

Nov 14, 2007 Joanna rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001, 2013-read, rws-2013-spring

Reread this classic figuring that I might get to see the new movie version. I didn't really like this book the first time that I read it many years ago. I think I found the story okay, but not especially compelling. This time, I was completely gripped by the book both as an interesting story as well as a commentary on the American Dream as a concept. Now I am fully prepared to see the movie version. All I need is a free afternoon and a babysitter...maybe I'll have to wait for the movie to be on ...more

Like · see review