The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is basically a book about vapid rich people being rich and vapid. I actually ended up quite liking it; I think it showed well the upper classes’ self-absorption and complete dissociation from everyday life, which means they have nothing better to do than organise their own sordid love lives. There are beautiful descriptions here, like that Daisy’s voice is “full of money”; she can be so happy and carefree and delightful because she has too much money to have to care about anything important. I found it a neat skewering of the rich and powerful.

I had intended to read this before going to see the movie when it came out last summer, but then I never made plans to see the movie and thus had no incentive to read the book. It stayed on my “to-read” shelf for so long that eventually I deleted it, but then I found myself on a plane home from Hobart with no other novels on my Kindle that I hadn’t read already, so I started with this one.

I guess one of the reasons I hesitated so long is I knew it was one of those books that lots of people study at school (although not me evidently), and most of the books I studied at school were kind of boring, so I thought this was going to be one of those. I am happy to say that it wasn’t. It probably would’ve been if it had gone on any longer, but it didn’t, so it wasn’t. I’d definitely recommend it.