I will always have a soft spot for Gatsby, it was my gateway drug into literature. I reread it every few years - the book is almost perfect, and short enough that you can get through it on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
I'm afraid I just don't get Gatsby. The characters are all unpleasant people; I don't want to spend any time with them. None of the situations resonate with me. Its prose is a great evocation of a time period, but it's a time period I don't much care about.
I felt the same way about Jane Austen for a long time. It was a parody of manners, for a period I knew nothing about. I finally saw some really great filmed versions and I understood what the author was saying, and now I adore reading her work.
Maybe Gatsby will click for me some day. I reread it every decade or so, just to see if it happened. It hasn't yet.
Mostly in that he hangs around with so many unpleasant people. He's rather passive -- the story isn't about him. He loves Gatsby, and I really can't say why.
I think I'm supposed to identify with the way he gawps at the opulence and the experience of being around the ultra-wealthy. His feelings are mixed, and I think I'm supposed to share that -- on one hand wanting to live that way myself, on the other hand being horrified by how vapid and idle it all is. But I get a lot of the latter and very little of the former, so I get a rather negative view about Nick as well.
I will say, I rather enjoyed “The Chosen and the Beautiful”, a magic-tinted retelling of the story from the point of view of Jordan Baker. I find her a rather interesting character.
Gatsby was a bit soured for me by having read it for the first time as an assignment in high school. Really sucks the fun out of literature when you're yanked out of it after every chapter to write a summary, or answer some dumb quiz questions about what color his car was in chapter 2
That's his debut novel and I think it shows. Experimental, and has some puzzling sections. Having read that, Gatsby, and Tender is the Night, I think the latter is his strongest writing but the plot isn't as grand and dramatic.
Agreed, one of my favorite pieces of literature. It's what got me into American historical fiction - I later ventured into Steinbeck and Mark Twain, both of whom are masters of the genre.
Love Twain and Steinbeck (most especially other works than Grapes of Wrath). Great Gatsby didn't work for me when I read it recently - just not my thing. I loved Catch 22 because I hadn't realized it was a comedy before I read it. It's tough because too often the best known past authors are unenjoyable to read.
