The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Not the edition I read, but it's my favorite cover!

Well, what can I say: Baz's movie's debut last year naturally prompted me to read the book before the film hit theaters. For only a second time, in fact. I liked it more this time, but I do have to admit to not exactly enjoying the book. The characters are flawed and there aren't many redeeming qualities in any of them. And the story sort of goes on... then ends. Just like that. A little tragic, but it doesn't necessarily feel like a fitting, nicely wrapped ending. 

That being said, it's a Fitzgerald book. For me the book is never about the story (or lack of one) being told, but the writing and the depiction of a fascinating period of time. Mostly, it's the writing. I love how he says things. Below, you'll find the text I highlighted. That brilliant writing and some of my random musings.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been running over in my mind ever since. (1) 
Perhaps among the most famous opening lines of literature.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. (4)

…one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax. (6)

They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. (6)
I love this idea of being rich as a thing to do

And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool. (17)
Oh, Daisy

This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque  gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. (23)

But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. (23)
Don't those eyes sure get a lot of attention when the book is taught

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. (35)
Totally, bro, I feel ya

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. (39)

I believe that one the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. (41)

… I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table—the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone. (42)
Quite true about my social life in 2014, not just that gilded age

It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. (48)

Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theater district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible inside. (57)

But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home. (58)

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight. (136)

…and its driver hurried back to where Myrtle Wilson, her life violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick dark blood with the dust. (137)

I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the window’—with an effort he got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face pressed against it—“and I said ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!” (159)
Outside the window was the Doctor's eyes! Gasp! Is he God?

Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away. (177)

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (180)