The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

This week we're doing a little blast to the past. The Great Gatsby is widely recognized as belonging to the esteemed (and sometimes snobbish) genre known as classics. Personally, I have never ventured outside of the Jane Austen section of classics, which I'm realizing is the rom-com section of the classic world. If Pride and Prejudice is a rom-com, then The Great Gatsby is a soap opera written in book form. Going into the book, I expected a slightly dull and hard-to-understand read, much like the expectations that I tend to have about some of the other "great" classics. Instead, The Great Gatsby pulled a fast one on me.

This novel follows the fabulously, and famously, wealthy Jay Gatsby and his mishaps in his love for Daisy Buchanan, the beautiful girl from his past. The book details all of this, plus the lavish and lux parties held on Long Island during the Jazz Age in America.

I'll admit that it was a rocky experience starting this book. Code-switching from modern YA and adult Lit to twentieth-century classic writing was rough. Once the switch was made, the book swept me into a world of the luxurious and boisterous parties of the wealthy, where the booze flowed freely, along with the wild gossip, despite the ongoing Prohibition in America. Oftentimes the booze overflowed, and the narrator's drunken haze lent the story a fever-dream-like quality. Combining this with some of the outlandish things that happen, it feels as if you really are in the midst of an actively unfolding soap opera except without the common modern stereotypes, and with all new, or I suppose old, tropes. The book also depicted the interesting contrasts between the poorer population and the wealthy population. This provided a grounding base to the book that kept the plot from floating away.

Overall, I found The Great Gatsby to be a pleasantly surprising classic, that kept me hooked and curious, all while feeding that secret little gossip all of us have. If you're seeking an uber-dramatic and scandalous affair of a book, I recommend The Great Gatsby to you! If you are wanting to try to read a classic but are scared of being bored out of your mind by any of the prospects, I recommend this to you as well!

Happy reading!

- Renee

(The cover: courtesy of Goodreads)