Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

500 words on how I have nothing to say

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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There can’t possibly be something left to say about this book. It’s been a keystone in the American education system since the 1960s, with literally millions of students reading and analyzing this book. To some degree, this is a testament to the timelessness of the novel, and I can’t imagine being an English teacher having to dredge this text year after year. But I’m not an English teacher. I’m just a guy who skipped most of the required books that serve as the glue to […]

My new obsession

The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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I’m fast approaching 40, and I’ve never read F. Scott Fitzgerald. That seems to be my answer for a lot of the standard reading people do in high school. I can’t stress enough how terrible I was as a student. Also, I can’t stress enough how good I was at finding loopholes. The Beautiful and Damned was Fitzgerald’s second novel, published in 1922, and it is the novel that propelled him into the literary elite. He and Zelda had firmly settled into their marriage, and […]

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about halfway between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel.

Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald

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So there’s apparently two editions of this book out there and my copy is the originally published one, finished by Fitzgerald, and reviewed while he was still alive. He apparently left some notes about changes he could make, and Malcolm Cowley made those changes, and I am generally against such actions, so I am glad, I unwittingly read the original. The novel takes place on the eastern end of the French Riviera, near Cannes it seems, and involves two main storylines that come together initially […]

I’m waiting for it; that green light, I want it (CBR12Bingo2: The Roaring Twenties)

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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I don’t think that there is a single take on The Great Gatsby that hasn’t been done, overdone, flipped and reversed. But there’s a reason that so many people have written about this damn book – it’s a marvel of precision. There are no words wasted. This is particularly awe inspiring for me, who has never met a five word sentence I couldn’t torture into twenty. In my desperate attempt to say something fresh about a book I’ve read a hundred and eleventy twelve times, I […]

Pretty people doing not pretty things

The Great Gatsby: The Graphic Novel by Fred Fordham

The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Novel Adaptation by K. Woodman-Maynard

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cbr12bingo The Roaring 20’s The Roaring 20’s probably would not be the Roaring 20’s if not for The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I am not going to go all English Lit on you and say the meaning of the story but will tell you it is about several 20-to 30-something rich, spoiled, brats (editorial comment) and their boredom. You can say that our narrator is unreliable, judgmental, the whole works. Or not. But in the end, what it is all about is people […]

And exhausted is my patience. (back to school, bingo)

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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I was hoping that re-reading this might make me more apt to like it; after all, it’s been eleven years since I graduated college and this is seen as one of Fitzgerald’s masterworks. But yeah, after MeToo there is no WAY I’m feeling anything resembling sympathy for Dick Diver, the worst psychiatrist in history.  There’s actually a line in flashback where Dick states his aspiration to be the world’s best psychiatrist and his partner thinks he’s joking and laughs; I laughed too because HE MARRIES […]



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