I’m juggling books right now; trying to decide between F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon. I am leaning toward the Chabon book more for the reason that I want to read his newest novel and have heard so many great things about this one, but I also wonder if it’s because I am leaning away from the sometimes inaccessibility of Fitzgerald’s work. It has taken me twenty years to feel comfortable admitting that I don’t know everything, that I know so little in relation to all the discoveries yet to stumble upon, so I don’t have a big problem saying that The Beautiful and Damned put me to sleep, as much as I read it, and I’m awake only slightly longer for This Side of Paradise.
I’ve read The Great Gatsby several times, mostly because I’m a teacher, and I pore over the sentences to extract further fascination to share with my sleepy juniors. Gatsby is my book for several reasons, but one is definitely that it’s a classic American text that I get. I understand it. It’s not above me. The book churns forward and is subtle in its revelations, unlike contemporary (to me) American fiction which seems to spell out everything for the reader. I’m not even talking about genre fiction, either. Literary fiction is blending haplessly with the mainstream, and it’s made an American literary dumbass soup for aspiring scholars to sip.
8 Comments
Skip both and read Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” It’s just better.
Oh, and Gatsby is more fucking brilliant every time I read it.
I’ve read all of McCarthy’s books, and I’ve had The Road in my hand so many times at the bookstore. I just can’t get myself to buy a hardcover book.
Dude, “The Road” is now in paperback!
Read Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s “Shadow of the Wind”.
I love Gatsby. I just reread it on the train back from Pittsburgh. It still bothers me on some level, because we’re supposed to feel sorry for a bunch of irresponsible aristocrats. And yet, their unhappiness is lovely.
The only thing i remember about reading This Side of Paradise is the last scene. Hopefully you’ll get to it.
Read Fitzgerald. I’m biased. He’s one of my favorites.
P.S. Way to have a Moleskine.
P.P.S. I’ll stop by LHS to say hi before the end of the year.
Fitzgerald is one of my favorites, too, but I can’t relate the man who wrote This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned with the one who wrote The Great Gatsby (the best of his novels), Tender is the Night, and The Last Tycoon (which was looking very promising). Write off the first two, and don’t apologize to anyone for it.
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