For a first post to my blog, what could be more appropriate than posting a link to an article about a book I haven’t read in decades?
The BBC (henceforth ‘the Beeb’) had an interesting piece on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel THE GREAT GATSBY, which is one of those American novels most Americans (at least in my generation) were assigned to read at some point in our adolescence and / or early adulthood.
Find the article here:
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210209-the-worlds-most-misunderstood-novel
I was fifteen when my eleventh-grade English teacher passed out copies of THE GREAT GATSBY to us.
My first glance told me it would be long. I don’t recall that it bowled me over, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever read. (My least favourite assigned tome of that period of my secondary-school education was another famous book by different titan of American literature for the same class.)
It was the Titans of American Literature year.
I didn’t really understand GATSBY. The Beeb article suggests that many don’t, even when they are no longer fifteen and no longer so very very certain of always being right.
Having learned that many people who knew more than I did — and more than I do now — have had difficulty through the years understanding the book, I feel marginally less stupid when I think of GATSBY.
Marginally.
It feels like a good time to explore it again. I’ve acquired a copy, as well as copy of Michael Ferris Smith’s novel NICK, in which he tells a back story of Nick Carraway, the character who narrates THE GREAT GATSBY.
Once I’ve finished with the current novel I’m reading (by yet another titan of American literature), assuming I do finish it, I will try to tackle GATSBY and see if my cluelessness might diminish.
No promises.
Welcome to my website. It is a work-in-progress. The AI fillers currently occupying most of the space will be replaced gradually by my own written efforts and, probably, some pictures of the cat who rules our home and allows us to live here in exchange for our undying servitude.
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I will send it out to your inbox six to ten times a year, beginning probably in the early summer 2025. In the meantime, check back to see which AI bits I’ve replaced with things I actually wrote.
And cat pictures…
Thanks for stopping by. May your day be better than your favourite book.
PS — Whatever you may think of GATSBY, surely we can agree that there absolutely needs to be a Muppet version:
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