Book Review: The Great Gatsby

By F Scott. Fitzgerald

Having nothing to do before college started, I used the great large Li Ka Shing Library(in which I am sitting right now) to issue some reading material. Little did I know that this was a college library, and was thus unsympathetic to the cause of light fiction. To be fair, it did contain a Jeeves omnibus, but little else. Oliver Twist isn't exactly my idea of an enjoyable evening's sit down, and the Philosophical fare looked very uninviting. Some day, I shall read Franz Kafka's metamorphosis, but that day's not for another month, at least.

So what I did pick up and read was The Great Gatsby, a story primarily about a man named Gatsby(who'da thunk it) and...well...how he goes about attempting to get a girl. This of course is not blindingly obvious, wherein lies the beauty of the book. The second wonderful thing you will find is that, well, it doesn't really have a hunky dory ending. Unlike most love stories, this neither ends in Tragedy for the pair, nor a happily ever after. Gatsby dies, and well...no one really cares. It really makes you stop and think, about how you should lead your life, how you should prioritize people, and how you shouldn't wait too long.

This wasn't, as I had hoped, a fun read. It was, however, a very good one. One where you feel great sympathy in the end for the characters. One where you end up thinking about what went wrong. And ultimately, the clincher as far as I'm concerned, one where a lot of people die.
You can't really end a story without killing someone off.