The Great Gatsby #1

This book is so magical. That description sounds very unoriginal and played out, but magic is all I can think of when I think of The Great Gatsby. Not that magic is literally used, but love plays a huge role in this story, and I find love to be very magical. So "magical" it is. The language Mr. Fitzgerald uses to describe every detail is just incredible. I love how he introduces characters, like Daisy and her friend Miss Baker in the beginning of the book, compared to how he describes characters such as Tom Buchanan. Daisy and Miss Baker are given images of laughter, simpleness and lovely female charms, while Tom is seen as much more serious, darker and stronger. It truly gives readers a sense of the time period, of human behavior in the twenties. My favorite part of this book was the descriptions. The descriptions of people, like Mr. Gatsby, of places, such as the valley of ashes and of the thoughts like those of Nick Carraway, the narrator. I love Mr. Gatsby's smile, described as "...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. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself,"(p. 48) That explanation of a smile is absolutely gold. It makes Mr. Gatsby seems like a person I would kill to just have a simple conversation with. Perhaps, one who I would invite to dinner, if the infamous "If you could invite ten people to dinner, living or dead, who would you invite?" question was ever actually posed upon me. The Great Gatspy has descriptions that I could paint in pictures, if I wanted to. They are all so perfectly constructed, and I loved that about this story.