The Great Gatsby

All fiction. - The Great Gatsby. Really enjoyed it and seemed fitting with the current times. - Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann. Generational wealth come and gone. Good for putting things into perspective. - Things Fall Apart, Achebe. - The Pearl, John Steinbeck - Hyperion (first book), Dan Simmons. Great sci-fi. Bought the second book and look forward to reading it. - Stoner, John Williams. Incredibly well written book - One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez. Still finishing but I hope to finish in time for next year

Old Man and the Sea. Was forced to read it in high school and promptly forgot it. Read it again and it's amazing. A short but big story about wants vs. needs with a surprising but inevitable ending. Before that, The Great Gatsby. Same thing - forced to read earlier, then decided to read again. I missed so much about it the first time around. It's kind of sad how education can tarnish classics in this way. To re-iterate another commenter, Code by Prezold is surprisingly good (based on first few dozen pages). I had low expectations based on what seemed like hype, but so far it's holding up. It reminds me of the way that James Burke in his series Connections wove what seemed to be entirely disconnected technological threads together.

I don’t think I can suggest a singular book everyone should read, but I can say which book probably had the biggest effect on my way of reading. I’m dyslexic and growing up reading was always a challenge, despite doing well at school and university I was a slow and uncritical reader. My girlfriend (now wife) was teaching The Great Gatsby to a class and practically made me read it. The process of reading that book and discussing it with her completely changed the way I read, it was an enlightening and incredibly enjoyable experience. It was as much about the discussions we had about the book as the book itself. So my recommendation is find a book that you can read and discuss in depth with someone else. For me it has become a delight for us to both read a book and then talk in depth about it. You gain so much more insight.

Yes, there's much to reflect on in The Great Gatsby. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

The Great Gatsby taught me the folly of silent sentimentalism. Awareness of your emotional state is like a super power, or a Cassandra complex. Awareness that you've arranged your fortunes around a one-sided attachment to an illusion is the last bulwark against self destruction, especially when the marketing department eggs you on. Being able to identify it in others can be useful and alienating.

Getting More - Stuart Diamond. I still think this is the best book on the art of negotiation. Getting Things Done - David Allen. If you have adult ADHD like me, and you haven't read this, it's the first system that's really worked for productivity for me. Man's Search for Meaning - Victor Frankl. Living Buddha, Living Christ - Thich Nhat Hanh. Cosmos - Carl Sagan. The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. LeGuin. The One who Walks Away from Omelas - U.K. LeGuin. Wild Seed - Octavia Butler. The Heike Monogatari - (tr. Helen Craig McCullough) “The sound of the Gion Shoja temple bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sala flowers reveals the truth that to flourish is to fall. The proud do not endure, like a passing dream on a night in spring; the mighty fall at last, to be no more than dust before the wind.” If you need a comparison. this is the Japanese historical equivalent of Game of Thrones combined with a bit of MacBeth. The rise and fall of two shogunate families, and an analysis of the tragic flaws of character that brought their fall about. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo. Small Gods - Terry Pratchett. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad.…

I'm a little partial to The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald writes as though painting through the forrest with a brush made of wind. I've never seen the movie, and I don't intend to; the writing in this book takes the imagination on a ride like I've never felt before or since

The books I've enjoyed reading most this year are ones I ought to have read in high school some 15 years ago, but just never did because I didn't enjoy reading and never made the effort: The Great Gatsby, As I Lay Dying, and am currently reading Cry, The Beloved Country

It depends on what you like. Flannery O'Connor's fiction is extraordinary. I bet you'd like Nabokov based on what you've said so far; I like his earlier Russian novels best (which have excellent English translations), like The Defense, for example. If you want to go whole hog into postmodernism then try Pynchon or Gaddis. The 19th century Russians from Gogol to Chekhov are pretty much can't-lose. Turgenev's Fathers and Sons is beautiful and captures the spirit of youth. Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier is a short masterpiece. The Great Gatsby is as good as its reputation says. Read Dickens if you want the essence of the English language and character. Read Kafka for the strangest articulation of modernity. Bruno Schulz is more whimsical. Borges is another whom your list suggests you should try. If you really want to go down a rabbit hole, find Martin Seymour-Smith's Guide to Modern World Literature and browse through it to blow your mind. It covers everything and seems impossible, except it exists so it can't be.

> The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald I read Gatsby and came away with two thoughts: 1. How incredibly well constructed. Almost every paragraph weaves a story together that starts off slow and then accelerates incredibly rapidly. 2. I think it's so popular because it paints a picture of rich people as actually unsuccessful at what really matters to them, depraved, inconsiderate, immoral, and miserable and hollow on the inside. Note how frequently the book is recommended by English professors with no money who generally hate wealthy people - it's like, "see, they're like us, just even worse!" Worth reading, though, at the very least to see what the fuss is about. It is incredibly well-constructed from a writing standpoint.

Two of my favourite summer books: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland Any friend of Gatsby is a friend of mine.

I got myself a Sony Reader mid-2009 and started reading about twice more than I had been before. 2009 was also the first year in which I wasn't too lazy to document which books I read (I'm really glad I wasn't). Here're some of the favourites this year: Classics: Kafka's The Process and America - both stunning novels that deserve to be read as much as his most famous, The Castle. Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa - a trippy collection of tales organised in multiple nested frames. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. Still as breathtaking as I'd remembered it from the previous reading five years ago. Science Fiction: Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe, whom I hadn't read before, turns out to be in a class of his own. It's literary SF, overwhelmingly masterful and beautiful in its prose and characters, yet it could give any hardcore SF novel a run in terms of its ideas. It demands and richly rewards a close reading. I'll be reading more Wolfe in 2010.…

"Great Gatsby" by F.S.Fitzgerald. Really awesome book.

1. The Count of Monte Cristo 2. The Great Gatsby And yet I read mostly non-fiction... :) It's hard to say these are my absolute top two (that's probably an eight-way tie in reality), but Gatsby definitely hit me at a pivotal time and became a subtle but big influence, and Monte Cristo was just a brilliantly entertaining yet very deep and touching story.

The Great Gatsby and The Book of the New Sun

V. by Thomas Pynchon The Life of Pi by Yann Martel the McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (Not a book per se, but very enjoyable) Shakespeare (Everything, I'm surprised he's only been mentioned once so far) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe Shogun by James Clavell Then, of course, the regular hodgepodge of Card, Asimov, Adams, Gaiman, Pratchet, Stephenson, Feynman, and that LOTR guy, Tolkey or sommat. (In all seriousness, though, all of these authors are phenomenal, if well-known for being such)

Confessions of an Economic Hitman, The Wealth of Nations, The Great Gatsby, See No Evil, Hannibal