Due to switching schools halfway through high school, I never was assigned this book to read for class. As such, I got to college and realized I was the only person this happened to so it immediately catapulted to the top of my "To Read" list.
I had really high hopes for the novel after hearing how John Green and Nerdfighteria loved this book. I finally got to reading it this summer and I have to say....
I wasn't
that impressed.
I will say that the language was clear and concise; you could easily understand what the author meant to say, which I definitely appreciate(especially after tackling Beowulf). It was elegant and fairly well-written.
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| The modern versions...with more cheating. |
I found the idea of portraying the rich youth engaging in lives of glamourous excess to be...banal. I think I've been desensitized by shows like Gossip Girl and the like. It seems like a lot of shows follow this line of thought: they drink, they party and in the end there's some kind of humanity left in these characters, a redeeming factor. They lead lives of leisure and they are bored out of their minds. They have everything, yet they have nothing of substance. They are eternally cursed by wanting things they cannot have and above all, happiness seems to elude them even though they have their material needs more than taken care of. I know that Gatsby came first so really, the 'current' media is copying Fitzgerald, not the other way around. But the storyline doesn't really do much for me. It doesn't grab my attention in the way that some of my favorite novels do.
I feel like this is one of those novels which one could easily discuss at length about the symbols and the different characters and such and if I had to read this for a class, I think I could probably do that convincingly since there seems to be enough material to discuss. I read the book fairly quickly so I'm sure there's a lot more than I gleaned from my first reading. However, as far as grabbing my attention though, this novel kind of struck out.
