The Great Gatsby

          I recently read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was so incredibly different from any book, especially a classic, that I have every read before. The Great Gatsby took place during the Jazz Era, an era that I had no background knowledge about. Unless of course you count watching the Woody Allen movie Midnight in Paris. But, there is no better way to learn about a new era than to read a book by someone who lived it. So a redeeming part about reading this book was that I know quite a bit more about the 1920's than I did before.
          The whole plot of the book is based on an affair between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan.  Gatsby is a mysterious rich man who everyone's heard of, but nobody really knows. Daisy is an aristocratic married young women who's beauty and charm conceal her shallow nature. The book however, is narrated by neither Gatsby or Daisy, but by Nick Carraway. Nick is the perfect narrator; he is connected to both characters (He's Daisy's cousin and Gatsby neighbor), but he is not blinded by love and wealth, as everyone else is. He is logical. Logic seems to be the thing that the people he surrounds himself with are missing. It was interesting to see the story unfold through Nick's perspective. Although he has misgivings about Gatsby, he still admires and respects the man. It is Nick's logic that stops this story from being a total romance novel, and I for one think that is a good thing. 
         The imagery in this book was also quite impressive. It really made the book click for me. You could  really imagine the 1920's. But the best part of this book was that it was easy to understand for the most part. I am so used to having to re-read every page of a classic novel five times before it makes sense. It was a breath of fresh air to read a classic that I could actually understand the first time! I highly recommend this book to first time classic literature readers who want to get the full experience of a classic novel without being very confused half the time.