The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is one of those books that high schools like to make their students read but somehow I dodged that so I finally read it this year.

Frankly I found the characters pretty unlikable, especially Tom Buchanan. I recognize this takes place in the early 1920's but his racism and abusiveness is still jarring to read. I really wish he had gotten some sort of comeuppance at the end but he didn't.

Nick is so generic; we know barely anything about him other than he decided to go to NY to try his hand at selling bonds for an investment firm. He also is engaged and there's a bit about how he's trying to break it but we never get a resolution to that thread. He feels forgettable despite being the narrator.

Gatsby himself, he could have gotten what he wanted if he had been more subtle, but then again he was being almost as brutish as Tom towards Daisy, just in a more charming way.

I just didn't feel satisfied reading this story and if I were a teacher I'd probably refer to this book as “The Great Gatsby, or Terrible People Being Terrible.”