The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This book can be found on the Sybervision, Observer, BBC, Zane Top 10, and My Book Lists.
I had originally read The Great Gatsby sometime in high school, but it was a book that I felt the urge to at some time revisit. This past year (2026), I have both seen the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and seen the Broadway musical. So I undertook to revisit the novel because both of those stories, were surprisingly nearly identical, and very different from the story that sat in the dustbins of my memory. Listening to the audiobook of the story I discovered that this is a very, very short novel and that the reason that the movie and Broadway musical were so nearly identical is because there isn't much extra fluff to the story. They adapt the story nearly flawlessly, minus some addendums towards the end that were skipped or glossed over, and some characterizations that were altered. The story is amazingly poignant, especially today. It is a dual story, where one of the stories is about the glitter and glam of the 1920's and how the rich were overly "stuffed" and detached from the working class people of the world. And while they sometimes entered into the everyday suffering of the lower classes, they always stood apart. And Gatsby was that crossover, a kid of the lower classes who was determined to raise himself up, and eventually found a girl, Daisy, for which he strived to do it for. But the second story line is about everyone's past and trying to live in it while the future moves on around us. Gatsby could never let go of the past. He spent his life trying to regain what was lost, to the point that he wanted to reset his relationship with Daisy to their historical point of separation. It is what ended up getting him killed in and leaves a note that the past is the past for a reason, and we all need to live in the present. I liked this book upon revisiting it far more than I expected to. The story is well written and the language used evokes the sophistication that Gatsby was trying to evoke. The story was also very tight, that sometimes I would miss a line while listening to the book and have to jump back because the story wasn't making sense. In one instance, someone had shown shown up that wasn't there before, but I had missed two words in a sentence that heralded his arrival. This story, at times, moved at a lightning pace. Overall, I greatly enjoyed this one and have placed it on my Must Read List.
