Last Book Club we read The Great Gatsby and the consensus was it was both a good and (mercifully) short read. Talking about it amongst the fine environs of the Tiled Hall Café we mulled over what it must be like to be so rich you can hire a hotel suite on a whim and then decide equally on a whim to leave it and what Prohibtion and the Depression must have been like to live through.
We talked about whether or not we trusted the narrator - not much but maybe more than the rest of the characters in the book and decided that Gatsby wasn’t the kind of man you’d want as a boyfriend. Daisy would be a fine short term friend that you’d see a lot of when she didn’t have a boyfriend but she wouldn’t be reliable in the long term. Not that she was reliable in the short term either – given the way she treats Gatsby. His love for her was more about the ideal of her and the reality of her rather let him down. Tom might have a lot of money and superficial charm but in reality he was thoroughly unpleasant and best avoided.
We split into camps when we divided the main characters into the following categories – marry, have a brief fling with, or shove off a cliff. Some of us would have had a fling with Gatsby. Some with Tom given this description of him '…the enormous power of that body, he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat’. But as he is also arrogant, racist and rude we decided that actually the best bet was to take all of their considerable wealth off them and then throw them all off of a high cliff.
We also wrote names of books we fancied reading on slips of paper and then whichever one was drawn out of the bag would be the next read. Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg was the one pulled out and we will be discussing that on Sunday September 15th at 2pm. Venue to be confirmed.
It’d be great if you came along to discuss it too – don’t mind if you haven’t finished it. Only seen the film version, only read a Wikipedia entry about it, just come along and share your two-pennorth’s worth.
