Wednesday, May 08, 2013

What It’s Like to Read ‘The Great Gatsby’ for the First Time at 37


What It's Like to Read 'The Great Gatsby' for the First Time at 37

By Jason Bailey on

With Baz Luhrmann’s splashy adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel contender hitting theaters Friday, Flavorwire is devoting this week to all things Great Gatsby. Click here to follow our coverage.

I’m still not sure how I’d made it to age 37 without reading The Great Gatsby, but this much was for sure: I was going to have to. It’s never a bad idea to read the source material when gearing up to review the film adaptation of a highly regarded literary property (though the finite number of hours in the day certainly prevent that notion’s translation from theory to practice), but my editor’s suggestion for a “Gatsby Week” piece on the difficulty of adapting Fitzgerald’s classic to celluloid sort of cinched it. “Ha, ha, funny story, I’ve never read it,” I chortled, and her nonverbal response to that ill-timed bit of mirth made it clear that I’d be doing so sooner rather than later. … Read More

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