The Great Gatsby---Personal thoughts

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is the one book that is closest to my heart. It is the story of building up a dream so profound in its survival, that it lingers on, allowing no true reality to match up to its intensity; inevitably extinguishing all life from those who dare dream it.

For a very long time, I have lived the ‘Gatsbian’ dream. I have loved the idea of a person and obsessed with that idea to the extent of believing it real. I know gatsby’s love, I have lived that obsession. When an obligatory greeting or a polite dance was enough to send me waltzing away into another world constructed by me, where things were simple and calculated. Where, my love and labor bore fruits. Where he turned out to be exactly the man he was meant to be.

For a long time, I pined his absence from my reality. For a long time, things didn’t seem right if they didn’t get me closer to him…for very long, I cursed my life for not intertwining with his as it did in my dreams. He could never match up to that. I never talked much to him, I also behaved irregular around him, subconsciously constructing a foundation for my dreams, so strong, that even his acceptance wasn’t spared the doubt of disappointment. I was delusional and in retrospect, I made sure he let me remain that way.

But also in this story, is the question of individuality. Did Gatsby not have that one first evening in the corner of the room, in the arms of his love, the complete realization of his dream in its entirety? What is more important? A long life of satisfaction or a life cut short by its passions and obsessions, but not before that one moment of ecstasy, rejoicing, in full awesomeness, the tangible truth of a dream come true?

Non-Fiction/Classics Five Challenge Sign Ups

Non-Fiction Five Challenge Sign Ups




I am signing up for The Classics Challenge. It runs May 1 - Sept 30, 2010. Apart from my chosen 5 classics (in the 10 choices I am allowing myself), I will also participate in the NON FICTION CATEGORY. I am listing those books as well.


Here are my selections for The Classics Challenge.

1. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
2. Madam Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. Persuasion by Jane Austen
4. Pride and prejudice by Jane Austen
5. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
6. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
7. Anna Karenina by Tolstoy
8. Dead souls by Gogol
9. Washington Square by Henry James
10. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

There is also a bonus in this challenge to read a book that will likely be a future classic. Since I own and have been dying to read:

The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald
The Poisonwood Bible
Midnight’s Children
The sound and the fury
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

I will choose two of these for the bonus.

My reading list for the NON FICTION category is the following:

1. Heartbreaking work of Staggering genius by Dave Eggers
2. The Year of magical thinking by Joan Didion
3. Bobbed hair and bathtub gin by Marion Meade
4. Lust for Life by Irving Stone
5. The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone

*Italics imply 'To be read in May2010'
*Bolds imply 'Done'