This is my second time reading this book, the first time being when I was a teenager in college. I rarely reread books but I wanted to refresh my memory and revisit this story. My relationship to this book has changed quite a lot since I read it all those years ago, so this was an intriguing reading experience for me. I spent a lot of my time treading slowly over each and every word, focusing more on the craft as opposed to the plot, which I know so well by this point, and really drinking in Fitzgerald’s prose. This was perhaps my favourite part of this reread, engaging more with the writing and imagery, and it is a truly stellar piece.

He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.

When I initially read The Great Gatsby, I thought it a glamorous book but I’m reluctant to call it that. It certainly glitters and beams in places, but I paid more attention as an adult to the facade of it all, and the barely concealed ugly and unsightly aspects of wealth, the material and human nature in general. On the surface, this is a love story and, to an extent, I think it is but it an obsessive love, not just between two people but with success and the American dream in general. I found the beginning of this book slightly dense as Carraway sums up his upbringing and the circumstances that led his to West Egg, yet it really came to life when Gatsby and Daisy reunite for the first time in five years. Fitzgerald's writing became fiercely vivid at this point, and I think the characters were so real to him that they leap out of the page, lively and excruciatingly human.

I think what I'm taking away from this reread is that I initially read this book with more of a Jay Gatsby eye and this time, I was a bit more of a Nick Carraway,