The Great Gatsby, American Fictional Triumph?

My sister Anna loves this book. She doesn't know why, she read it in high school, and loved it. On this premise I bought it when I saw it in the book store. It was good. I found out that F. Scott Fitzgerald was friends with Ernest Hemingway and the used to sip coffee at Parisian cafes. Until they had a falling out, due to jealousy on Hemingway's part, the book said this and I doubt it, what did Hemingway resident bad A have to be jealous about. Anyway the book was fine, but given all its hype I expected quite a bit more. I did stumble on an interesting letter that F. Scott wrote to his publisher. You see The Great Gatsby was not well received when it first came out. Its small first edition sold slowly and the small second printing didn't even sell out. This is strange given the novel's high standing in the current literary world. One list I found ranked it 2nd in comparative greatness. What happened in between. Well the little extras in the edition I bought provided the answers. The publisher pulled strings and contacts to get the book entered into education networks. They pushed to have it used in literature classes which is where the vast majority of the novel's readers have encountered it. My thoughts would be that the book is mediocre. I enjoyed reading it, but my mind wasn't blown. I will say it is a novel with substance, if one wished they could deepen their exploration of it but a superficial read generates superficial results. According to the extra commentary F. Scott wrote it in an impressionist style and a student could pull abstract ideas if pressured, but my feeling is that the novel is not so amazing. That a publisher propagated it into education circles to turn a higher profit on a project that didn't produce as expected.

The Dog Days Are Over

I promise I've been reading. I probably read three or four books in December, I just couldn't dredge up the motivation to post. But the book I just finished surprised and impressed me, and I decided I wanted to post about it and get all my thoughts out in text.

It's called Going Bovine by Libba Bray, and it's a young adult book I bought back in October or November. I got it because I have read some other books by the author and I had heard about this one. I stopped reading it after a few chapters, though, because I was bored and frustrated. The dialogue was stupid and I just couldn't get interested, and I felt like I was too busy to waste time on it. But then yesterday morning I picked it up again, just to hurry up and finish it so I could focus on Moby Dick (aka my own personal hell), and I was pleasantly surprised.

Going Bovine is about this 16-year-old stoner named Cameron who is lazy and takes life for granted in the extreme (and also he lives in Texas). His parents, who are both professors, don't know what to do with him, and his teenage sister resents him or something. The first part of the book basically lays down what a worthless pile he is, and it was the part that made me stop reading, because the dialogue was laughably terrible and the main character is super annoying.

But then Cameron gets diagnosed with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, aka mad cow disease, which is fatal and has no cure, and he gradually starts to die (he has seizures, hallucinations, et cetera as his mind decays). As he does, he gets more and more desperate to live. He's afraid of death and doesn't feel ready.

While he's in the hospital, an angel visits him and tells him that there's a reason why he is dying, and there's a way he can stop it and also save the world--and sends him on a crazy quest to Florida to find a cure for his disease. The rest of the book plays out in a way that is parallel to Don Quixote (and, P.S., I felt super smart that I realized this because Cameron drove a Cadillac Rocinante, which is the name of Don Quixote's horse).

The quest was the part of the book that was awesome, because, as it develops, the scenarios get more and more crazy. The best part about it is you don't really know if it's a hallucination brought on by his disease or if it's real life until the very end. Cameron keeps having flashbacks to his hospital room, but the situations he gets into are so detailed and random that it seems like there is no way they can just be mere hallucinations. As he starts the quest, his experiences are fairly believable, but eventually they get more and more insane, and the pace gets more frantic and desperate. Some of the situations he encounters are absurd and also hilarious to the extreme (a religious group that lives by the mantra "All Happy All the Time", a group of physicists who are trying to hop to parallel dimensions, an evil snow globe corporation). By the end of the novel, I was really invested in what happened to Cameron, which surprised me considering the fact I started off hating the kid.

I'm not going to necessarily recommend it to this group; I don't think any other member of this little book club would enjoy it as much as I did. But personally, I'm glad I read it. It was a diverting and surprising piece of work.