THE GREAT GATSBY
BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
PUBLISHED: 1925
AVERAGE RATING: 3.86
192 PAGES
★★★★★


The Great Gatsby. The book we've all heard about, but unless you had it in school you never really read it, but you saw the movie. I saw the movie first, shame on me, and I loved the movie, so I thought; why not try the book?

The book is well... I'm kind of lost for words, but it's beautiful in its own way. What I love about it is the way Fitzgerald uses his narrator Nick Carraway as the eyes into this story and how the one honest and decent person in the story tells us what really happened. He's standing apart from these happenings, even though he's still a part of them. He's the stark contrast to the other characters;

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--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.

The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession,” it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.

I think that in the end, Fitzgerald manages to show us the sad, bleak portrait of America while maintaining a sense of restrained optimism about the future. This is a book worth reading, not only because of Fitzgerald's amazing way of writing and capturing each moment in the book, but also because of its themes and characters.