Friday, September 07, 2007

reluctant

i excitedly determined to read 'tender is the night' a week or so ago. i'd read an excerpt in a fitzgerald collection, but i'm still recovering from a teenage conviction that gatsby was the only of his novels worth reading. i'd read that somewhere, i guess. as i set in, the novel was fresh, though some memory of having turned those initial pages remained. then, somewhere in the process, i almost completely lost desire to read it. my fear is that i've read so much nonfiction lately that i can't take a good tale any more. the problem with nonfiction is, a lot of the stuff i've read isn't all that amazing, and perhaps that's given me an overly skeptical attitude. i'd say there are some vexing tendencies in fitzgerald's writing at times, and 'tender is the night' seems full of them. fortunately, as i have continued, the story draws me in every time i get past the more tedious parts.

unrelatedly, i am discovering today that, as i expected, i really shouldn't listen to the old 97s all that much unless i'm seeing them live. i think i've gotten so used to hearing the music live that recordings just aren't enough. maybe it's just the wrong music to listen to at work, especially when people are interrupting you every 5 minutes.

3 comments:

abby said...

In high school and college, I was really into Fitzgerald. I agree the best book The Great Gatsby. It's one of my favorites. I read This Side of Paradise which was his first and most immature work. I tried The Beautiful and the Damned as well as Tender, and couldn't make it through either of them. I just want to smack F. Scott on the head and say stop living in your past. My attraction to Fitzgerald is his melancholy (as well as his affinity for Princeton, NJ). I read he suffered from manic depression so that was probably his problem.

becca said...

do you love novels? you can join my book club.

seth said...

I have read a good deal of Fitzgerald's short stories and generally enjoyed them. Have you read the book he was writing before he died? The edition published as The Love of the Last Tycoon is the one I read, and I thought it was brilliant.

I could go for a book club, I read a lot but have a hard time figuring out what to read. I started this laughably bad book recently, and I hope it's a quick read.