Monday, October 14, 2013

Book 3 Review for my Library Read-a-thon: The Great Gatsby


Book: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Rating: 4 stars

Review:

This turned out to be a pretty interesting story. You have to feel bad for Gatsby choosing to waste his life in hopes of recapturing something with Daisy (who in my opinion wasn't worth it at all). Despite being delusional and overly sentimental towards Daisy, he did not deserve his fate. I wonder how different his life would have been if he had just let her go? Why hold out for someone who was nothing short of superficial? She was just like all the rest of the sycophants who attended all his parties, fake and only out for herself. From the moment that Daisy and Tom were introduced to the story, I instantly didn't like them. Nick summed them up perfectly, as he said "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..."

I think the only character I liked was the narrator Nick Carraway. He's the only one that seemed relatively real and actually seemed aware of what was going on and tried to figure things out. While everyone else just seemed like users or truly didn't care what was happening. Through his eyes the reader got to see who Gatsby really was, which in itself was a rather sad story.

I thought this story held true to its time, of a glimpse into the lives of the well to do with nothing to do but party and create problems just to have a little drama in their lives. As well as the racial and class distinctions sprinkled throughout.

This book is well written but I think it's a book that is probably better understood as you get older. I haven't seen the movie and I most likely will see the movie but at the present I really don't have any desire to. But I am glad I read the book.

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