I have just not felt like reading lately. I powered through January with 9 books, but this is only the 2nd I've finished this month. Blah.
So, The Great Gatsby. I can't believe I made it through high school and college never having been assigned this novel. I had no idea what it was about when I started...if I'm honest, I vaguely thought baseball was involved for some reason...it's not, by the way.
I enjoyed it overall. The characters are intriguing and mysterious. It seems like there are secrets around every turn and the ending was all kinds of unexpected. Even when there didn't seem to be anything happening, I was still interested. The mundane day-to-day of these characters is more entertaining that my life will ever be. Something to remember: this novel takes place in the 1920s. Fitzgerald mentions several dates and it took me a while to wrap my mind around the fact that he was referring to the 1800s.
Some of my favorite passages:
- Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.
- For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.
- They were careless people...they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
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