A little thing known as The Big Read, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts, began in 2006 with several communities around the United States encouraged to “read a great book together.” This year, the program is nationwide, and the Virginia Foundation Center for the Book is one of 72 organizations to receive a grant to participate. While in the Newport News Public Library area, for instance, citizens are encouraged to read Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes were Watching God, in our area it’s F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. With all due respect to the Foundation’s publicity machine, we at C-VILLE thought we’d do our bit to get the word out. Here, then, are our Top 10 Reasons to Read The Great Gatsby:
10. It’s either that or get ticketed for breach of civic duty.
9. Three words: rich people suffering!
8. Fitzgerald wasn’t drunk while he was writing it—only before and after.
7. It’s much better than the sequel, The Enormous Fatsby.
6. No other American novel succeeds as well in enacting an allegory of this country’s unravished illusions and ineluctable declivities, as Gatsby’s Platonic conception of himself clashes with the loneliness of his dream-quest, and signs and causes correspond to create a univocal, panoramic deconstruction of one nation’s sense of self.
5. The movie sucks.
4. You’ll never get West Egg, Long Island, and East Egg, Long Island, mixed up again.
3. It’s roughly 500 pages shorter than Moby Dick.
2. The average American novel today reads like a tax-code manual in comparison.
1. Why not, old sport?