By F. Scott Fitzgerald
In high school, I wasn’t much for socializing or dancing. As such, I stayed home as a junior while my peers attending homecoming. That fall, like the two before it, my teachers stressed the importance of proper planning and staying on top of one’s schoolwork. I would ignore these lengthy announcements at the beginning of each class in the week preceding the dance—I wasn’t going, so it didn’t affect me.
I forget when we started reading The Great Gatsby. Class met two or three times a week, depending on the week. I think we had class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday that week, and I might have already read a chapter by Friday. But either way, we were just beginning to read the book. Even though I wasn’t really paying attention to those announcements my teachers made preceding homecoming, I was a student who followed rules and like to get ahead. Friday night, probably after spending a little bit of time playing League of Legends, I began reading The Great Gatsby. I don’t remember much of how it began, but I think I was mostly reading it to get through it, plunking down annotations where I needed to, as required by my English teacher. By the time, I got to the point of the story where Nick and Tom drive to New York, which isn’t very far into the story, I was hooked. I stopped annotating to just read. In my basement bedroom, hunched over my desk, I read. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t get up; nothing could get me up. My bladder was bursting, and I felt that painfully urgent stinging sensation. My eyes burned with how dry they were. It felt as though I had been doused with sand, but I just couldn’t take my eyes off of the page, not even to face the back of my eyelids. I kept reading and reading until I had finished.
I have a bit of a hard time reading. My mind is prone to wandering and my eyes prone to skipping lines, forcing me to re-read what I missed again and again. But when I did get through a good book, I really enjoyed it. But never did I enjoy a book this much. Never did I finish a book in one sitting.
The Great Gatsby is not a thrilling story like that of James Bond. It is not like philosophical, thought-provoking science fiction. The Great Gatsby is a story about rich people who don’t do much of anything, but it is so wonderfully written that readers cannot put the book down. The Great Gatsby probably has to go down as my favorite book of all time.
