My favourite book: The Great Gatsby

To be honest, I’m not a bookworm. Reading was usually boring for me,
especially the compulsory readings in primary school. In my opinion those books
which we had to read there were not written for 13 or 14 years old children. Luckily,
my literature teacher said that she didn’t like those books as well, so we had to read
only one or two chapters and than we watched the rest on the film adaptation.
Although, my first impression with reading wasn't really good, a few months ago I
bought this book because many people advised me to read it.
It’s called ’The Great Gatsby’ and it was written by an American author, F. Scott
Fitzgerald in the nineteen twenties which is also called the ’Jazz Age’. The plot takes
place in the twenties as well, during the prohibition, on Long Island which is a suburb
of New York City. ’The Great Gatsby’ involves the story of Jay Gatz who is from a
lower class Midwestern farming family. He falls in love with the wealthy Daisy
Buchanan, but because of the war he had to enlist in the military as a fighter-pilot.
However, he received many military awards and he’s got promoted to general, he
wasn’t happy, since Daisy got married during this time with Tom Buchanan, with
whom she had a child too. But when Gatsby found out that the Buchanans will move
to Long Island, he bought there a huge, gorgeous villa. He started organizing luxurious
parties, hoping that one day Daisy would show up in his house. At this point the
reader joins in the story, from Nick Carraway's point of view. He rents a small,
rundown cottage next to Gatsby’s mansion. Nick will be the narrator, from his point
of view the reader can follow the story of how Gatsby fights for Daisy's love.
Personally, I think it’s a very interesting story about a man who couldn’t accept
his fate and couldn’t get over his past. Even though, sometimes he’s depicted as the
icon of the true, neverending love, in fact he became a maniac. And the way I see it is
that we should call him ’Great’ only because he was the greatest in the falsification of
his own past. Apart from this, it’s a really exciting book. When you start to get to the
end of it, you just can’t put it down and you want more and more information about
what happened.
This is the reason why this story has several film adaptations, the best-known
was made in 2013, in which Leonardo DiCaprio played the main character. In spite of
that it has won two Oscars, I didn’t like it very much, to my mind the book version
was much better. In addition there is a musical adaptation which is also based on this
story. It was put on stage in Vígszínház, in 2019, but I haven’t seen it yet. As you can
see it’s a book in English language. I have read it in Hungarian twice, but not long ago
I bought its English edition, so now I’m planning to read it in English as well. In my
opinion it’s a very good way of learning a language.