The Great Gatsby

What is there to say about a book everybody reads in high-school? Certainly, I read it, thought it was “alright”, and set it aside. Decided to reread it at the end of summer to see what I had missed. There’s no use belaboring what 1000 Cliff’s Notes sites have done better, but this is a really beautiful, really sad book. It’s about dreams, and memory, and love, and losing, and in its subtle prose manages to capture something quite precious and perfect about how the mistakes we make define us.

It’s definitely wasted on high school students. You need to have lived at least a little bit of failure, a little bit of escape, to appreciate Gatsby