Superb... every time I read it I get something else out of it. Both this book and An American Tragedy were written in the same year. They both deal with similar themes... the destructiveness of the American Dream gone wrong... the shallowness of the Jazz Age.. Dreiser and Fitzgerald are both great writers! Both books are considered "the Great American Novel." I love them both and cannot choose! ( )

Okay, okay... I know. This is a classic work of American Literature. And Fitzgerald writes really beautiful prose. But when I'm reading, I need to have a character to root for--and I could not find one in this entire novel. Pretty much everyone is either cheating or helping someone cheat. Still... it's a nice snapshot of the "Jazz Age" and I love all the symbolism and the richness of the prose, so I can't say I didn't like it. I did. I just didn't love it because I couldn't really get behind any of the characters... and while that may have been Fitzgerald's point about the power of money to corrupt, I still have to be able to hope a character gets what he or she wants, or I won't care what happens in the end. And I really didn't. I got bored. So I took a star off for that. ( )

Sometimes you just gotta go back to the classics; or in my case, read it for the first time. I’m fairly certain this was required reading in my high school English class, but if so, I used CliffNotes to skate by - sorry Mrs. Elvin (although she probably knew).

Okay, back to the Great Gatsby or rather, the Great Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Wow, what a writer! His sentences, so verbose, so colorful, so full of adjectives. It’s interesting how current writers seem to do their best to choose one or two descriptive words, or better yet, one big one that many of us need to look up in Webster’s, and mock those who use more, easier to read words. I say, bring back the Fitzgerald style!

As for the book, another wow. How could I have gone decades into my adulthood and not read this book? So much to it: love, fake-love, romance, adultery, murder, and a cover-up; this is good stuff. Written through the eyes of Nick Carraway, the self-proclaimed honest story teller. He narrates the ups and downs of society high-life that he touches the outskirts of by happenstance - he lives, for a short season, next to J. Gatsby.

Nick tells us of the going ons of the Buchanans, Tom and Daisy; how Tom is seeing Mabel Wilson, who is married to the mechanic at the gas station, and how Daisy is in love with Gatsby, and of the parties - oh, the grand parties.

Nick himself is with Jordan Baker, socialite and golf pro, as a means to fit in and pass the time with the likes of those in society. At times, all those beautiful words get jumbled in the reader’s head, but still craft a fantastic story, one that never gets old: Love, jealousy, and murder.

( )

Loved it, can't believe it took me so long to read. They did a surprisingly good job with the movie. ( )

I didn't remember much of this from high school, and even if I had, then I was 17 with no life experience and these characters were over a decade older, and now I'm 38 with some life experience and the characters are almost a decade younger than I am. So surely a reread would be in order.

The most interesting thing about the book I'd say is the critical reaction and estimation of it. The novel itself I see as well written but with unlikely plot elements for a realist novel and weakness in characterization. I agree with HL Mencken, who said of it "in form no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that". The reviews of its day were mixed, which seems appropriate.

Now however it has been raised up to the very heights of the literary canon, symbolizing the downside of the American Dream. This despite the fact that becoming wealthy through being drafted into an organized crime syndicate is not, I thought, actually part of the mythical 'American Dream', which has more to do with success through hard work - of which there is none here.

Very well, but it is also symbolic of the Roaring Twenties, they say. Perhaps a very slight segment of that decade, yes, but the 1% is always the 1% in any decade, and today's super wealthy are surely as decadent as this. To be symbolic of a time period is to show the life of the great mass of commoners, which is not The Great Gatsby's concern.

There's the doomed love story, and the fact that Gatsby remade himself for Daisy. Well, it's made clear that he always had a lust to become wealthy and "successful", and this had nothing to do with Daisy; he ran away from his parents and from his background towards his ambition before he ever met her. The love story itself is fairly weak sauce: after they are reunited, about the extent of it is that Gatsby says that Daisy "comes over every afternoon". What happens those afternoons, what is Daisy feeling and weighing up at those times?

Wuthering Heights, it's not.

Not to say it's not a decent short novel. It has its merits, but The Great American Novel... no. ( )