The Great Gatsby

So the last time I checked in about my reading list was at the end of January when I had just started Anna Karenina. It has now been two months and I'm STILL reading the dang thing. Seriously, this book is a beast. Seven hundred and fifty-four pages of a whole heck-of-a-lot of words. ( FUN FACT! I just checked, the seventh Harry Potter book is seven hundred and fifty-nine pages. I'm pretty sure I read that one in about eight hours the night it came out... Maybe I should change "Fun Fact" to "Total Wizarding Nerd Alert).

Anywho, I began to get a little frustrated at my lack of progress on Anna Karenina (I am now on page 491) so this weekend I put it aside and read The Great Gatsby. I had read this one back in high school some time and while I remembered the basic story there was a lot I forgot. In particular, how gut-wrenchingly sad the whole story ends. Sorry if that's a huge spoiler for anyone.

I'm guessing, that as a sixteen year old, a lot of things didn't resonate for me back then. But this time I was struck by the loneliness of the book. Here are these characters who are caught up in the extravagant and frivolous world of the 1920's, drinking and smoking all day, throwing lavish parties and gossiping mercilessly - and yet they all just seem so lonely and secluded. Especially the title character of Jay Gatsby. He's at the center of this world, the center of gossip and rumors and he's the man everyone wants to know and yet at the time of his greatest need, everyone abandons him. It's just sad.

I could go on and on about what that all means and what Fitzgerald was trying to say about society but I don't particular feel like writing a paper on it all, and hey, I'm not in school anymore so I don't have to! Whoo! But there's my mini little book report.

Despite the sadness, I did find myself enjoying the book more than I did when I was in high school and I would recommend The Great Gatsby to anyone, especially for F. Scott Fitzgerald's brilliant way of saying so much with so few words.

. . . One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

I seriously read things like this and wonder, what's the point in writing? How could the beauty of that one paragraph every be matched? Ah well.

And because I love crossing things off a list:

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot

Oooh boy. Nine left. I'm really rollin' now.

--Shannon