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I thought you could read The Great Gatsby on Project Gutenberg for a while now? Or am I thinking of another Fitzgerald novel

Appreciate the compliment! My favorite books are Candide, The Great Gatsby, and My Antonia. Dracula and Frankenstein are really good too.

"Into Thin Air" Jon Krakauer

"The Great Gatsby" - F. Scott Fitzgerald

"The rich are different from you and me." -- F. Scott Fitzgeral, "The Great Gatsby"

Two of my favourite summer books:

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland

Any friend of Gatsby is a friend of mine.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

Nonfiction:

Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders by Jack D. Schwager (1993)

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (history)

Yep! And when he's done with it, he will read The Great Gatsby.

They were complaining more. Ever read The Great Gatsby?

The books I've enjoyed reading most this year are ones I ought to have read in high school some 15 years ago, but just never did because I didn't enjoy reading and never made the effort: The Great Gatsby, As I Lay Dying, and am currently reading Cry, The Beloved Country

22. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Don't sugarcoat 1984 quite so much. It is an important read, but it's also good to tell a reader that "the interesting bits" happen (very roughly) 2/3rds of the way in to the book.

At least it's not The Great Gatsby (blegh) 8 chapters of annoyance and one lonely chapter of actual non-world building.

The Great Gatsby and that light. Grrr.

I actually read it again 30 years later and it's a pretty good book. Terrible people in it though.

There are a few books whose everlasting fame eludes me. "On the Road" and "The Great Gatsby" and "Catcher in the Rye" all provided mystifying reads...because they are supposed to be great and manifestly are not.

I read the Great Gatsby in high school, not too too long ago, and it instantly became my favorite book. I would guess that English teachers pick it because it’s a short, fun read with lots of issues to discuss and lots of literary merit. I’m glad to see it’s finally in the public domain.

Whose translation of Candide do you suggest?

Read the Great Gatsby last year, was shocked at how much I liked it. Will definitely give My Antonia a read.

I read the Great Gatsby out of my own volition (well prior to the movie coming out) and I didn't really like it.

The Great Gatsby was the only book I had to read in high school that connected with me in any lasting way. What I get out of the text has changed considerably over the years, but that doesn't make my high school self's interpretation less meaningful.

I find F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby's placement on the list appropriate and Plato's to be suitably ironic. Gatsby had a library of uncut (i.e. never opened) books and Plato argued against placing too much importance on books themselves versus actually attaining knowledge.

The Great Gatsby entered the US public domain this year, and you can read it for free at Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/f-scott-fitzgerald/the-gre...

> "Scott Fitzgerald’s new novel, The Great Gatsby, is in form no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that."

That remark is from a highly favourable review, but you have to actually read it: http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-great-...

This is not what I meant to imply. While I prefer heavier reads, my point was that a cursory reading of any piece of literature pretty rarely results in a full consumption of it. The Great Gatsby is a pretty easy read, too, but it is steeped in symbolism that would be tough to fully interpret in a cursory read. Complexity != Quality

I had heard about "Gadsby" first, so when high school friends told me they were reading "The Great Gatsby", I was quite confused about why their English class would assign a book most known for not using the letter 'e'.

The Great Gatsby is one of my favourite pieces of American literature. I don't even know how this can exist. It just makes no sense. It would be like making Jabberwocky Kart Racing or something.

The worst thing is it doesn't seem to be that bad a platformer either!

I have a pile of links for getting started with DL in my comment history you can use: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10676455

What really helped advance my understanding from zero to knowledgeable novice was rewriting some existing code line by line (using expanded variable names and comments), and thinking about each line and what it does as you go. It's the software development equivalent of Hunter S. Thompson re-typing The Great Gatsby just to get the feel of writing a great novel. Here's one I did based on Denny Britz's tutorial:

Britz's Original: http://www.wildml.com/2015/09/implementing-a-neural-network-...

My version: https://gist.github.com/sthware/c47824c116e6a61a56d9

HTH

To further your point, most people have probably heard this one already regarding Hunter S. Thompson.

> While working, he used a typewriter to copy F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms in order to learn about the writing styles of the authors.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_S._Thompson#Early_journa...

By virtue of it being your favorite, I would think it's doing something right. But glibness aside, you could think about as you read: Is it fully engaging you? Is it communicating a complex idea in a simple and/or novel way? Is it making you feel something? Does it make you want to do something? These are all good markers, because writing is really just about communicating ideas well.

And if you don't trust your own judgment, you could look up some of the time-tested classics. Some of my favorites: The Great Gatsby, To Kill A Mockingbird, 1984 (fiction); Warren Buffett/Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters (business/sales writing).

Certainly, a/c also allowed humanity to live healthier in more places than ever before. Like I said, it's mostly an interesting thought experiment, especially because you can often look up what life was like in your area before a/c. In many cases none of us want to return to 100% of that lifestyle, but sometimes there are interesting answers there.

Part of the reason I started joking that a/c was a mistake was a friend noted how much of the drama of Southern US literature surrounds hot weather and commenting on such. There was an idea that all of the "best plays" such as Gone With the Wind, some of August Wilson's plays, and seemingly the majority of Tennessee Williams' plays, devote _a lot_ of the dialog to just how hot it is. That often leads to character's own tensions and dramas boiling out. It shows up in a lot of books at the time too, like Fitzgerald's works (The Great Gatsby). That lead to me joking that maybe a/c has lead to a great suppression of our emotions and a lack of good drama in our lives. It's obviously more a correlation in those works than a causation, but in its own way an amusing thought experiment in the different tempos of life in such places before and after a/c.

> Is there a chemical difference between this and the pleasure some get from reading great literary works

Yes, and that difference is the whole point of art vs entertainment. After consuming entertainment, you want more entertainment. But after consuming art - after reading The Great Gatsby - your eyes get yanked back to your own life. You start thinking "what doomed dreams do I have?", not "when will they release Great Gatsby 2?"

I couldn't stand most of the books I had to read in high school, especially To Kill a Mockingbird. Others included The Great Gatsby, & Lord of the Flies. All awful books IMO, & still dreadfully awful. I can't believe American culture thought (still thinks?) those books were good. Luckily I read books that I liked on the side to make up for it.

It can be hard to appreciate The Great Gatsby if, like many Americans, you were forced to read it in high school. The book is stained with your own memories of high school.

Even if you like reading, the experience of being forced to read some particular book can make it feel like the book itself has wronged you.

I'm sure most of any discussion that will happen about this article is about dissatisfaction with copyright law.

I just want to say that of every book I was required to read in high school, The Great Gatsby is the only one that I never understood why we read it. The only thing I got out of it is "Being a vapid rich asshole isn't all it's cracked up to be". I understand it as a product of its time and a portrait into the Roaring 20s, but that subtext works better in an actual History class than an English class.

V. by Thomas Pynchon

The Life of Pi by Yann Martel

the McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (Not a book per se, but
very enjoyable)

Shakespeare (Everything, I'm surprised he's only been mentioned once so far)

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

Shogun by James Clavell

Then, of course, the regular hodgepodge of Card, Asimov, Adams, Gaiman, Pratchet, Stephenson, Feynman, and that LOTR guy, Tolkey or sommat. (In all seriousness, though, all of these authors are phenomenal, if well-known for being such)

I see a few reasons for this:

First, the books that introduce us to the world of literature tend to stay with us, especially those we choose on our own. This is opposed to the books we are forced to read because they are "great." For example, I still hate "The Great Gatsby" even if it is objectively great because I was forced to read it in a class with a teacher whom I did not respect.

So, I'm going to say Piers Anthony was more memorable to me than Hemingway. I'm sure that Harry Potter would have stayed with me if I'd read it at 12.

I watched through these lists and noticed that some of my best read friends still had YA books on their lists, so it doesn't seem to be "just" a matter of people who don't read much.

I don't know, I have read some very good and critically acclaimed books from the so called modernist period and I never thought they were particularly boring or lacking of plot. That includes the Great Gatsby which has a pretty good plot, and some hemingway books.

Also my favorite authors like Nabakov, Heller, Vonnegut, PKD, Chandler, Hammet, etc. always had pretty interesting plots. They were not idiotic "made for tv plots" where every single conflict had to be neatly resolved by the end of the book, but they were interesting and absorbing. They were also very critically acclaimed.

I think really the problem is that there is a subjanre of novels that emerged that is intended exclusively to be read as assignments in college classes. These tend to be incredibly boring, so that literature professors so that lit profs can justify their existence and because most readers are essentially forced to read them. If those types of books are dead, good riddance.

1. The Count of Monte Cristo
2. The Great Gatsby

And yet I read mostly non-fiction... :)

It's hard to say these are my absolute top two (that's probably an eight-way tie in reality), but Gatsby definitely hit me at a pivotal time and became a subtle but big influence, and Monte Cristo was just a brilliantly entertaining yet very deep and touching story.

> A school board in Alaska has got more than it bargained for after pulling classics including The Great Gatsby and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from the school curriculum, with members of the local community offering incentives to students to read the books anyway – including $100 (£80) prizes and free mac’n’cheese.

[snip]

> The books remain in school libraries, but will no longer be taught.

> According to a flier from the district’s Office of Instruction, Angelou’s memoir had been challenged over its “sexually explicit material, such as the sexual abuse the author suffered as a child, and its ‘anti-white’ messaging”, while Fitzgerald’s classic novel was pulled for “language and sexual references”. Invisible Man was marked for containing “language, rape and incest”, while Catch-22 was included for its violence, “a handful of racial slurs” and the fact the characters “speak with typical ‘military men’ misogyny and racist attitudes of the time”.

Here's the full flier as a PDF:

https://go.boarddocs.com/ak/matsu/Board.nsf/files/BNQSWL743B...

And just to add to the above . . .

This is not a problem confined to ancient texts. If you read The Great Gatsby any time before the 1990s, you probably read a quite "corrupt" version of it. And, of course, there's Hamlet -- a textual situation so complicated, that some scholars have spent most of their careers trying to work it out.

In a different domain, the journalist Hunter J. Thomson was known to type entire novels to learn the style of master novelists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_S._Thompson):

"During this time he worked briefly for Time, as a copy boy for $51 a week. While working, he used a typewriter to copy F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms in order to learn about the writing styles of the authors."

Read all the time; write all the time.

As far as 'process', play with different stuff and find what works for you. I find it does help to outline a bit -- but only in the most informal way. I edit better on paper. Hunter Thompson actually typed The Great Gatsby to get a feel for Fitzgerald's rhythms. Fuck around until something fits.

Edit your copy ruthlessly. I will routinely change 90% of my copy between first and final drafts.

Keep your audience in mind: who you're writing for should affect every word.

Write as tight as possible.

What's particularly interesting, and was unknown to me, was that 'The Great Gatsby' was not an immediate success. I was similarly surprised when I read that 'Moby Dick' had an initial print run of 500 copies and that only 3215 copies were sold during Melville's lifetime [0]. I guess authors get second chances.

[0] https://www.biblio.com/moby-dick-by-melville-herman/work/550...

Looking at my GoodReads favorites that qualify as classics, these are the ones that I enjoyed the most:

  - Anything by Jack London
  - Anything by Ernest Hemingway
  - *One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich* by Solzhenitsyn
  - *The Fixer* by Barnard Malamud
  - *Northwest Passage* by Kenneth Roberts
  - *To Kill a Mockingbird* by Harper Lee
  - Anything by Nikolai Gogol
  - Short stories by Guy de Maupassant
  - Most of John Steinbeck's works
  - *Lord of the Flies* by William Golding
  - *The Great Gatsby* F. Scott Fitzgerald

Also, if you're reading Kafka, In the Penal Colony is a short story I enjoyed that I don't see mentioned much.

Sorry for late answer I actually learned English this way and I think that there's no such thing as being competent but more like being comfortable, it took me couple years to be able to pick up books like The Great Gatsby, Great Expectations and read them without needing a dictionary you may take less time it really depends on how much energy and dedication you put into it.

"[Hunter S. Thompson] chose, rather than writing original copy, to re-type books like The Great Gatsby and a lot of Norman Mailer, the Naked and the Dead, a lot of Hemingway. He would sit down there on an old type-writer and type every word of those books and he said, 'I just wanna feel what it feels like to write that we'll.'"

HST: "If you type out somebody's work, you learn a lot about it. Amazingly it's like music. And from typing out parts of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald - these were writers that were very big in my life and the lives of the people around me - so yea I wanted to learn from the best I guess."

http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.com/2014/06/hunter-s-thomps...

They just speak to people in different ways. Personally, I got a lot out of "Catcher In The Rye" and "On The Road", but the themes of those books resonated heavily with me at the time.

I enjoyed "The Great Gatsby" as a story, but it didn't connect with me in the way it seems to connect with others. However, I suspect that read in a different moment of my life its impact could be profoundly different.

If the survival of a single person is "high stakes" in fiction, then what do you even consider "low stakes"?

> I admit I'm limited to the sample I've experienced personally but it's over 90%.

You need to read a wider selection of books, then. Try, say, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, Of Mice and Men, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, A Christmas Carol, The Grapes of Wrath, The Time Machine, Dune, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Foundation series, anything by Ray Bradbury... there's a very long list of books that are not driven by simplistic good vs. evil conflicts.

Reading literature's pretty different from reading easy fiction. It takes a different approach and mindset to appreciate it but it's incredibly rewarding when one does. Think "acquired taste", or maybe the difference between reading a pop-math book and a math textbook. Ditto reading non-contemporary fiction, so that's two hurdles to overcome in this case. I don't have any sage advice on how to gain the ability to read and enjoy literature, aside from that for most people it takes practice and persistence before it's comfortable, like getting used to the temperature of a pool. Starting small helps and is probably how most people work up to the point of being genuinely excited and gripped by something like Moby Dick.

I guess if I had any advice to offer to someone wanting to achieve that (if it's an achievement) it'd be to try older popular literature (try King Solomon's Mines, it's amazing, then work your way to even older stuff) to get used to older English (nb not Old English, which is another thing entirely and you're not likely to encounter much of it in anything but an extremely deep reading of English lit) and to read short, relatively easy "literary" works that are more recent. Vonnegut's way at the easy end. Maybe try Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or his short stories? Salinger's Nine Stories? I'm not sure—at this point I have trouble judging what's approachable. I'd make a terrible teacher of literature.

Lots of things kinda work this way. Jazz and "classical" music usually take some work on the listener's part, to personally learn and develop, before they yield their greatest fruits. Most folks have trouble enjoying silent films, but there are some damn good ones out there. Just takes effort and time.

>> I'll say it again, it's a piece of writing that wouldn't warrant any attention if it weren't for the author's status here.

This is probably true. If I was the person to write this, and post this on my personal blog, and submitted it to HN, nobody would give a fuck.

Of course, that may not indicate anything, because that could be said for Newton's Principia, Einstein's Relativity, The Great Gatsby, Proof of Fermat's last theorom...

I think the question isn't "Would the world appreciate this if it weren't by PG?" but "SHOULD the world appreciate this, even if it weren't PG?"

On the other hand, a lot of the books I had to read for assignments weren't good reading, but did convey good messages.

1984: A HORRID read, but a very telling archetype of distopia.

The Great Gatsby: It really took 8 chapters to cover the thin vain outer shell before cracking in to the empty but interesting destruction of it all? Maybe a good metaphor for market crashes and corrections, but not a good read.

The discussion part; I don't recall having a single meaningful actual /discussion/ of the books in class. That might have actually helped make the mindless drudgery of reading them have more meaning and allowed for deeper reflection about the meaning of the content we head read.

> The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I read Gatsby and came away with two thoughts:

1. How incredibly well constructed. Almost every paragraph weaves a story together that starts off slow and then accelerates incredibly rapidly.

2. I think it's so popular because it paints a picture of rich people as actually unsuccessful at what really matters to them, depraved, inconsiderate, immoral, and miserable and hollow on the inside. Note how frequently the book is recommended by English professors with no money who generally hate wealthy people - it's like, "see, they're like us, just even worse!"

Worth reading, though, at the very least to see what the fuss is about. It is incredibly well-constructed from a writing standpoint.

Those undertones you hear are only giving you half the story: look at what happens to users. Cocaine was legal and used by the intelligentsia initially. Coca-Cola had cocaine; Sherlock Holmes took it to eliminate boredom. Prohibition in the U.S. was completely a moral-issue law, and was repealed a couple decades later. Cocaine is still illegal 100 years later. Why? Because society discovered that it doesn't turn out so well.

These "high-performers" mentioned by the parent post, do you want to live the lives they did? O. Henry died when he was 47, in part due to liver cirrhosis. [1] F. Scott Fitzgerald died when he was 44, in large part because of his drinking. [2] Frankly "The Great Gatsby" feels kind of dingy and depressing, and I, personally, do not want to have the kind of experiences in my life that would enable me to write such a book. Hemingway had four marriages and ended up committing suicide. [3] All the people I know that have been through a divorce describe it as extremely painful; to do it three times must leave a huge emotional scar. Is that the kind of "happier lives" you want to lead? Is it really high-performing to die at 44? How much greater could they have been if they weren't depressed, addicted, and/or lived twice as long? Have you read about the kind of lives alcoholics and their families have, let alone addicts of heavier drugs? Do you like being out of control (because when you are addicted, the addiction controls you, not the other way around)?

Be wise. Don't believe the lie that you would be free if only those taboos weren't holding you back. What if there is a very good reason those taboos are there?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._Henry

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway

Stop shopping start doing.

- All these decisions I call shopping, where you do a lot of research but never commit. At some point you have to start working on something.

- I bet you have a few candidates for what things you want to do/use. Pick one, start using it. Only then can you figure out if that's the right choice or whether you need to do/try something else on your short list.

If you are too nervous about something because it all matters too much, then start with some throwaway thing that is related that you won't mind if it turns out a mess. Usually I pick something with a problem area that I have mainly been "shopping" for, and put the tool/language/data/etc through it's paces.

If you don't know where to start, re-create/copy something that already exists. That will reduce the need for planning for your first steps.

It's been said novelist Jack Kerouac re-typed F. Scott Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby twice because he that it was favorite book and wanted to write like a book like that, by actively putting those words on paper he got a better understanding of how to write.

Man, I really have to re-read the Great Gatsby.

It's ridiculous it's assigned as high school level reading. Yes the prose is appropriate for high school understanding, and the base themes are comprehensible enough, but man, the entire subject matter of this book largely revolves around scenarios, concepts, and behaviors one usually doesn't become aware of, or have any direct experience of, until adulthood.

Worse still, forcing students to read the book in high-school/ end of junior high probably just turns them off from it, or leads them to falsely feel like its not worth as much as it actually is because so much of it is attuned to adult experiences teenagers can't quite sync up with yet, even if they were born into a rich family or use the fullest powers of their imagination.

There's a tremendous gulf between the social landscapes of adults and those of children. (Though you could perhaps argue part of the point is to maybe show this isn't the case--nonetheless, I think certain things defy comprehension until we've experienced them ourselves, or until we've at least encountered sufficient analogues or had enough time to synthesize a variety of other proxy experiences into an equivalent)

It will be interesting to see how this further affects our society as public anonymity starts really going away. I have been reading The Great Gatsby. There was an interesting moment in the book where Gatsby shows the main character a medal from the war as well as a photo of him in Oxford.

THAT was how he proved that he went to Oxford. Nowadays, if you want to know where someone went to school you'd do a quick search and take the first thing you find. If you are more diligent you'd dig deeper.

It's also very clear that Gatsby treasures his anonymity and the reputation he's built around being mysterious.

The reason I bring this up, is that it represents (in my mind) an indicator that there is an argument to be made that public anonymity has already changed so much in the past 20 years. Granted there were still ways of verifying all of this information before it was just a lot slower.

This post just stirred up some thoughts that I had this morning while reading. The internet more drastically technology have changed our culture so much it's almost impossible to realize the effect.

Just thought I'd share some musings I had this morning that tied into the current topic.

Getting More - Stuart Diamond. I still think this is the best book on the art of negotiation.

Getting Things Done - David Allen. If you have adult ADHD like me, and you haven't read this, it's the first system that's really worked for productivity for me.

Man's Search for Meaning - Victor Frankl.

Living Buddha, Living Christ - Thich Nhat Hanh.

Cosmos - Carl Sagan.

The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. LeGuin.

The One who Walks Away from Omelas - U.K. LeGuin.

Wild Seed - Octavia Butler.

The Heike Monogatari - (tr. Helen Craig McCullough) “The sound of the Gion Shoja temple bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sala flowers reveals the truth that to flourish is to fall. The proud do not endure, like a passing dream on a night in spring; the mighty fall at last, to be no more than dust before the wind.” If you need a comparison. this is the Japanese historical equivalent of Game of Thrones combined with a bit of MacBeth. The rise and fall of two shogunate families, and an analysis of the tragic flaws of character that brought their fall about.

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo.

Small Gods - Terry Pratchett.

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad.

The Guide - R. K. Narayan.

Evidence - Mary Oliver.

All of Us - The Collected Poetry of Raymond Carver.

Silence - Shusaku Endo.

The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Murakami Haruki. This and the next four are odd choices, perhaps, since it's a surrealist book, but IMO books that force your imagination to work hard do as much for creativity and fresh ideas as any of the more popular methods.

The Well-Built City (The Physiognomy / Memoranda / The Beyond) Jeffery Ford - Surrealist novellas best described as about the protagonist living and achieving agency within the constructs, dreams, and nightmares of a "Great Man's" mind.

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson.

Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon.

Dhalgren - Samuel L. "Chip" Delany.

I can't defend the Esquire piece but the Great Gatsby is my personal favorite American novel.

It's a story that seeks to describe the great divide between the middle and the upper classes.

I'm really not clear what you mean by "something is about to be said...but isn't."

It's a novel. Do you mean that you didn't understand the purpose of certain story events or do you literally mean that nothing is revealed in the story.

In my opinion, Stephen King might be the best English language novelist since the mid 1950s or so. I think people mostly look down on him because he's generally identified with horror, which is of course his typical genre -- but his work transcends the genre and is deeply literary.

Carrie should be on the bookshelf next to other somewhat recent masterpieces like the Grapes of Wrath, Invisible Man (Ellison's), Lord of the Flies, the Great Gatsby, and Ulysses.

The Great Gatsby is in the public domain in all countries but 7:
the USA, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Samoa, Saint Vincent and Grenadines, and Ivory Coast.

All countries except the USA apply a law that states that books enter the public domain a given number of years after the death of the author. In Europe, it is 70 years, in Canada 50, in Mexico 100. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_copyright_len...