Masterpiece Book Club Selection for July

June 21, 2012

"I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

It was originally titled Trimalchio in West Egg, but his publisher convinced F. Scott Fitzgerald that the literary reference was too obscure for readers. So, Fitzgerald went with a title he was truly ambivalent about: The Great Gatsby. He intended it to be his masterpiece. He succeeded in pouring into the canon of American literary history a fluent and melodic slice of life in the roaring 20’s, a time when hems climbed higher, booze was bootlegged (or mixed in bathtubs), and jazz babies wandered through Long Island’s North Shore in a disenfranchised fog. 
 
The story of Jay Gatsby, Tom and Daisy Buchanan, and Nick Carraway still resonates today with its themes of society and class, love, mortality, wealth, visions of America, memory and the past, and dissatisfaction with life. The mesmerizing original cover of the book remains one of literature’s most famous works of art and captures perfectly the sense of society’s eyes watching all, and seeing little.
 
The Great Gatsby is the selection of the Masterpiece Book Club at North Independence for the month of July. It has been made into film five times; the most recent will open nationwide on December 25, 2012. There has never been a better time to reacquaint yourself with a literary trip to West Egg to soak up the ambiance of a bygone era and join in the bathtub-gin revelry of a party on the Gatsby estate. We can’t promise bathtub gin, but we can promise an enlightening hour spent discussing the book and its twists and turns. 
 
Please join Ed and Brenda on Monday, July 16, at 7:00 p.m. as the Masterpiece Book Club meets, greets, and discusses. Copies of The Great Gatsby are available at the front service desk to be checked out. We look forward to seeing you there!

Brenda N.
North Independence Branch