Weekly Blog #11: Initial Reaction to Fitzgerald's Book

I need to work on my attitude. Anyone who knows me can vouch for that because there's no denying that I can be a really negative person. I mean, I wouldn't exactly consider myself a pessimist, but if you were to have me look at that metaphorical glass of who knows what, the first thing I'd point out is that I wasn't getting my money's worth. We don't need to get picky with words to figure out that I'm still going to be thirsty. And we'll say that that makes me a realist, okay? That's fair.

Anyway, the point in my saying that was to highlight that, yet again, my poor outlook managed to hinder my ability to dive into a book with an open mind. In quite the same way that finding out that The Things They Carried was about war made me less eager to read the book, stumbling through the first few pages of The Great Gatsby, my eyes getting wider and my annotations becoming more confounded as each additional paragraph supplied more confusion, had a similar effect. However, after discovering how much I loved Tim O'Brien's novel, I should have been able to predict that my astonishing ability to wrongly assess how much I'll enjoy a book based on just one aspect of it would rear its ugly head once more.

And so, after just a week (not even, actually) of reading, I have already found it necessary to admit that I misjudged The Great Gatsby and see myself liking it the more I read it. Mind you, it's by no means my favorite book after just a few chapters, but I'm developing more respect for it than I anticipated I would. Fitzgerald has a really fantastic way with words--a way of making me smile to myself when I read it and write one too many annotations that read "haha" or "beautiful".

Also, I find myself relating a lot to Nick already, if that even seems feasible. We don't get to read much about Nick as a character, but just by taking in his reactions to the situations he encounters or noting the subtle quirks and humor in the text, we can get a pretty good feel for his personality already. I seem to think along the same lines as him, for the most part, which is a nice change of pace from getting flustered and angered by what happens in my Multi-cultural Literature book (which is chock-full of injustice, rodeos, and death). I'm not quite sure yet if Fitzgerald structured his book in a way that makes everyone feel connected with Nick (thoughts anyone?) or if it's just a me (and, apparently, Andrew) thing, but regardless, it's working with the mystery of Gatsby to keep me sufficiently interested.