Currently Reading: The Great Gatsby

Still crazy after all these years, old sport. Like many of you I was subjected to The Great Gatsby in high school, long before I could appreciate it, long before I had the vocabulary to understand it. Long before I turned 30.

Or maybe you enjoyed it back then. I don’t know. I didn’t. This time around, though, it was a very different book and I read it because I wanted to. It’s one of those on The List that you always hope you’ll get back around to reading when you have time. And I mention turning 30 because it’s close enough in age to the characters that I feel like I can identify with—at least—the stage of life they’re in. Certainly, I’m not in that world, but I recognize the same hopes, dreams, the desire for escape, and the longing for greatness and meaning.

I’m not a writer and there have already been volumes dedicated to this book so I will refrain from creating a half-review of this masterpiece. I don’t have the skill. Instead I will leave you with this passage which I thought was one of Fitzgerald’s best:

Under the dripping bare lilac trees a large open car was coming up the drive. It stopped. Daisy’s face, tipped sideways beneath a three-cornered lavender hat, looked out at me with a bright ecstatic smile.

“Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?”

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone before any words came through. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek and her hand was wet with glistening drops as I took it to help her from the car.