Rating: 
Summary: Not so great Gatsby
Review: Response to literature is a matter of taste and taste is often a matter of experience. Those who haven't read much (and widely) are less likely to be able to discriminate between what is significant and what is not. But even experience and an open mind do not guarantee a positive response to every classic. I always wanted to like The Great Gatsby because it was one of those books in the canon of accepted 'great' American books, but repeated attempts at the book still leave me cold. I don't find anyone in the novel to care for and if one doesn't care about the characters, one doesn't care what happens to them. 'Gatsby', I think, is a minor book about very shallow people. Fitzgerald's language seems, to me, overblown and almost, at times, adolescent. I think it is significant as a document - a historical marker for a period in American history - but not as a great work of art, or of entertainment.
Rating: 
Summary: some guy..with an opinion
Review: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Awsome....if you like Death of a Salesman, check this book out. Our lives seem to be an endless series of New Years Resolutions...stop chasing dreams tommorow, chase them now.
Rating: 
Summary: I struggled to get through - then I failed the test.
Review: Okay. There's a program at my high school in the English department, called "Accelerated Reader". You are assigned a book off of a list, and you are to read it, then take a test about it on the computer. The program is quite helpful (I think), but when I was assigned The Great Gatsby, I was struggling to get through it! There were maybe one or two parts (for me) that made me want to keep reading. The rest I had to jam down my throat. It is well-written, therefore I give it at least one star. But it was so "boring", that I failed my test on the computer! I've aced every other one that I've taken, so I know it can't just be me. No one I know has passed that test either, because it was "just too boring"for them, also.
Rating:
Summary: A Romantic Tear Jerker
Review: The Great Gatsby is a book written for romantics. It is a prime example of how greed can control and destroy lives. It is told from Nick Carryway's (Gatsby's neighbor and Daisy's cousin)point of view. He is more of a spectator and observer than a part taker; this allows the reader to get a better understanding of what is taking place. It starts out slow and confusing, but once all of the scandals, parties, and affairs begin to take place there is no way the reader will be able to put it down. Jay Gatsby is a poor army man when he falls in love with Daisy, and she is a wealthy woman that doesn't want to change her way of life when she falls in love with him. So she marries Tom Buchanan, a wealthy business man, that can provide her with the life style she wants; to Daisy money is everything. Gatsby decides to spend the rest of his life doing anything and everything to become rich and the kind of man Daisy wants. Once Gatsby and Daisy's lives begin to entwine several years later there is nothing to stop them--at least they think so. Every character goes through trials and heatache that cause the reader to get so emotionally involved that he feels as though he is there being a part of everything taking place. Everyone should read this book because it contains mystery, love, death, and betrayal; all of the concepts that make a novel truely interesting.
Rating:
Summary: so boring i wanted to kill myself
Review: back in high school, after we were finished with the book, my english teacher told us he never understood why this book was so highly regarded. he called it "stupid." i had never agreed with a teacher until that moment.
Rating:
Summary: Glamor with a capital G
Review: We all are attracted to glamor;some of us live in the past. We can all learn things from this book; like, how corrosive money can be, when love is gone we should move on, and that we all live some kind of misguided life. It's the book Bret Easton Ellis, Tom Woolf, et al, have always tried to write but never managed to come remotely close to. That's why, dear readers, it's still with us today. Check it out.
Rating:
Summary: The scales of the butterfly
Review: Ernest Hemingway, who had a lifelong love-hate relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald once described Scott's talent as "perfect and delicate as the wings of a butterfly." Yes, and that is what the lucky readers get in The Great Gatsby:that wonderful, exhilerating, lyrical delicacy shadowed by tragedy. I keep re-reading this book. It contains four or five of my favorite scenes in all literature: the scene of Daisy on the couch in the cottage with the breeze billowing her dress; the car accident at the party when we glimpse this dancing shoe emerging from the car; the great passage about "those thrilling, returning trains of my youth" and the scene where they're getting drunk in the hotel. There has never been a better, more subtly written drunk scene. Many have called Gatsby the best American novel of the century. It's not hard to see why. It's got everything in it. And it still stands, fresher than ever, as the great sad story of the American Dream gone sour.
Rating:
Summary: Fitzgerald's Masterpiece!
Review: The Great Gatsby is a wonder of modern literature. Fitzgerald skillfully exhibits his disgust with the patrons of the roaring twenties and their disgust for the up and coming "bourgeoise." Not only that, The Great Gatsby is interesting! The shattered dream of Jay Gatsby is one of utter horror. It really makes you wonder what kind of society we live in!
Rating:
Summary: Whoa
Review: This book was very fun to read. I really didn't relate to it at first because I didn't understand the characters; I didn't understand how people could be so childish, but I guess that's what having filthy rich parents does to a person. When I saw the movie I understood better what Fitzgerald tried to get across in the book, even though the movie wasn't that great. Then I read the book again and enjoyed it a lot more. It is very, very good, a perfect representation of what I felt about the life and characters of the '20s.
Rating:
Summary: Rediscovering a masterpiece
Review: It's been fourteen years since I last encountered F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic short novel "The Great Gatsby". What I've found was a much richer, much more perfect book than I'd remembered-- a book that evokes a time and place, and yet manages, I think, to speak to all times and all places where people have dreams, and where dreams go wrong. Because of it's brevity, "The Great Gatsby" aspires to a kind of structural perfection that longer and more ambitious masterpieces such as "Moby Dick", for example, cannot begin to approach. Every scene contributes to the careful design of Gatsby's disillusionment and his eventual undoing. Every sentence, every word tells. Fitzgerald's prose is as tight and vigorous as it is rich and elegant. On this reading, I noticed the complexity of the emotional tone that Fitzgerald evokes. His narrator, Nick, seems to celebrate Gatsby's extravagant romaticism, even as he exposes its shortcomings. The effect is lyrical and cynical at once, much like life itself. I also got a better handle on the ambiguities that inform the character of Nick. The very first thing that he tells us is that he is slow to criticize others, and yet the narrative that follows is informed with Nick's judgement and implied criticism throughout. Later, he tells us that he is one of the few truly honest people he has ever known-- and yet in the end, Jordan Baker accuses him of fundamental dishonesty. I haven't figured out who is closer to the truth. Perhaps I'll approach the answer in some future reading. I'm already looking forward to the pleasure.
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