Week 20: The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald (180 pages)

The fun thing about this project is that I can re whatever I want to. I am not in a book club, so I don't have books that I am required to read - but I have many friends that give me great suggestions. I also have a bookcase full of favorite books that have made an impression on me over my lifetime  of reading. One such book is THE GREAT GATSBY. This was required reading in my sophomore or junior year in high school. I don't remember the paper that I wrote or the grade that I got on the test, but these characters resonated with me years after my initial discovery of them.


I chose to re-read this classic to see if the story stood up and to see if it affected me the same way as it had those 20 plus years ago. F. Scott Fitzgerald is a genius and the way that he used words and a turn of phrase to draw the reader in was brilliant. Jay Gatsby, Tom and Daisy Buchanan, and Nick Carraway are just as pretentious and elusively slick as ever. Reading again, I thought that I might want to skip bits that weren't exciting - but I didn't. From page one, I was sucked in to the showy world that is a facade for a world much darker than it appears. 


This is a book about deception, but I am not telling a lie when I said that this was a great book to re-visit. If you haven't picked up this book since high school, it may be time to check it out again. I don't think you will regret it.