The Great Gatsby (1925)

If I have a fatal flaw as a reader, it's that I'm easily dazzled by exquisite prose.  More than once, I've gushed about a particular book to anyone who will listen, and when someone takes my advice and reads it, they come back unimpressed.  The story's too thin or meandering, or this plot point is a deal breaker, or there's not enough momentum.  But see, that's the thing - when the writing, the actual arrangement of the words themselves, is utterly sumptuous, I forgive almost anything.

The Great Gatsby is a book for the likes of me.  Not that it's poorly plotted - the words alone wouldn't have made it a classic - but I've heard my share of complaints that the tale is insubstantial and Daisy is the ultimate "she's not worth it" woman.  I don't mind; the prose is a thing of beauty.  I've not yet gotten myself well enough in gear to read any of F. Scott Fotzgerald's other works, but I feast on his words here.  Told through the voice of Nick Carraway, a perceptive young man bearing witness to the book's dizzying and extraordinary events, the novel brims equally with Jazz-Age verve and Midwestern quiet.  In Fitzgerald's hands, the story becomes poetry, and descriptions of even the most minor occurrences grip me.

Living in Long Island after the war, Nick's world is inexorably entwined with that of his neighbor, the mysterious and fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby.  He attends the decadent parties Gatsby throws every weekend and is soon drawn into Gatsby's elaborate orchestrations to reclaim the love he lost some years before.  It's a story of noise and life, love and death, money and blood, relish and regret, and Gatsby is the enigma at its center.

Nick is one of those narrators who exist chiefly as a lens through which to view the more colorful characters around him.  Gatsby is like a planet Nick orbits, and Nick's cousin Daisy is both the light that warms Gatsby and the disease that consumes him.  The book is rounded out by the combustive Tom, the lusty Myrtle, the brow-beaten George, the sly Wolfshiem, and the dispassionate Jordan.  Still, Nick is vital to our immersion in this world - besides the wondrous prose, he grounds our view of these characters, gets them and sees into them in ways that they may not fully manage themselves.  He's the window, bringing observation and insight and offering a stable foundation whenever the story soars too giddily.

Warnings

Drinking, smoking, sexual content, a few scenes of violence, and some illegal activity.