Dat Fitzgerald.

Reading The Beautiful and Damned now. Enjoying it but Christ does he like to use word variety. It's the complete u turn from someone like Hemingway.I just get lost in the paragraphs and let my eyes do the work, sub conciously but not fully reading the text.

>implying Gatsby wasn't baller as hell.

It was most definitely baller. Thoughts on Fitzgerald?

I read The Great Gatsby and I enjoyed it a lot. I will get around to reading his other works sooner than later I'm sure, and I doubt I won't enjoy those as well.

There was something about the theme of Gatsby that really got me, the kind of longing of it. I feel like that kind of theme fits into the core of human emotion. Every human stares out at the light across the sea.

The part describing right before Gatsby was murdered was amazing writing, too, I thought.

When I read Gatsby, I can't help but feel depressed. Happiness seems to elude everyone in the novel, and it seems to imply that this lesson applies to anyone who dreams and searches for something. Beautiful ending though.

I put This Side of Paradise down very quickly though. Perhaps I didn't give it a fair chance, but it just didn't grab me.

perkunas wrote:I read The Great Gatsby and I enjoyed it a lot. I will get around to reading his other works sooner than later I'm sure, and I doubt I won't enjoy those as well.

There was something about the theme of Gatsby that really got me, the kind of longing of it. I feel like that kind of theme fits into the core of human emotion. Every human stares out at the light across the sea.

The part describing right before Gatsby was murdered was amazing writing, too, I thought.

I like how the title of the book came into focus at the end. It was Gatsby that was the only one worth giving a damn about.

Bakuninger wrote:I like how the title of the book came into focus at the end. It was Gatsby that was the only one worth giving a damn about.

And yet at the end it seemed very few did give a damn about him.

So far I've only read The Great Gatsby, but This Side of Paradise is currently sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read.

Gatsby is my favourite book. It sparked my interest for literature when I read it in high school about two years ago.

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

That whole theme that the past is always with us...brilliant.

I've also only read This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby. I read Gatsby my freshman year of high school, I need to re-read it. It depressed me, I remember. I read This Side of Paradise a few months ago, and it seemed to be much in the same vein as Gatsby, if a bit more optimistic.

I've read Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, Tender is the Night, and The Last Tycoon.

I love Fitzgerald's style, he's got a great unpretentious prose and a sly but not-too-cumbersome wit that together just make for great storytelling.

Tender is the Night and This Side of Paradise both have moments of beauty that are hard to put exactly into words... The same with Tycoon, which is a great and under-appreciated work (though it is unfinished.)

Overall I'm a big Fitzgerald fan, I'd rank him as easily one of the greatest American writers. He's likely the best of the 20's ex-pat school.

I'm currently reading The Great Gatsby (on the last chapter now, so almost finished), and I'm sort of disappointed. Mostly with the content, I think. Everything is so subtle, and so odd. Fitzgerald seems to oscillate in his writings from beautiful ways of describing things, and pleasant prose, and then all of a sudden there's long passages which are boringly tedious - and I find I have to reread them because I stopped paying attention somewhere in the middle.

I feel I'm really missing out on something here, because other than the atmosphere of the time the book was set I don't feel there's anything particularly extraordinary about the book at all. There seems to be a general consensus that this book is a great work of fiction, but why?