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I read 'The Great Gatsby' for book club and hated it way more than I expected
Everyone in our book club kept saying how amazing Gatsby is, so I went in ready to like it. But I got about 50 pages in and I was just bored with all the descriptions of parties and rich people problems. The writing felt stiff and I didn't care about any of the characters, especially Gatsby himself who just seemed like a creepy stalker. My whole group was shocked when I said I thought it was overrated at our last meeting. One lady actually argued with me for 20 minutes about the symbolism of the green light. Has anyone else felt like a classic book just didn't live up to the hype, or am I missing something?
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the_lisa1mo ago
oh man, i keep seeing people talk about gatsby like it's this deep profound masterpiece and honestly i just don't get it lol. like yeah it's about the american dream and whatever but is it really that serious? the whole thing feels like f scott fitzgerald wrote it while he was bored at a party and just kept describing curtains for twenty pages. i read it in high school and my teacher went on and on about the green light symbolism but honestly it just felt like a guy staring at a light for way too long. and gatsby being a stalker is spot on like dude shows up to a random house uninvited and everyone acts like that's romantic. sometimes a classic is just a book that got lucky with timing, not actually good.
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janah831mo ago
Gatsby’s a bootlegger using a dead guy’s house to pretend he’s classy.
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oscarc121mo ago
See, I get where you're coming from but I actually think that's the whole point of the book. It's not supposed to make Gatsby look like some tragic hero. He's a fake through and through, using a dead guy's house like you said. That empty mansion is literally built on lies and crime. Fitzgerald is showing how hollow the whole thing is. When I read it the second time as an adult, I realized the green light isn't some deep mystery. It's just a guy chasing something he can never have because it was never real in the first place.
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