Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

The Rainy Day obsession with The Great Gatsby is well known. There's the annual re-reading; there are reflections upon the annual re-reading and there are the many moment when we feel that the great work reaches out from the past to address our often troubled present.

In today's New York Times, F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 work gets an interesting twirl in Gatsby's Green Light Beckons a New Set of Strivers. Facts new to us, and which we find very uplifting: Gatsby is required reading at half the high schools in the USA, and it sells more than 500,000 copies a year. The two combined suggest a bright future for the greatest American novel ever written.

Given the current debates about the "wealth gap", the "credit crisis" and our so-called "Gilded Age", Gatsby has never been more relevant. Apart from the honesty with which it addresses ambition and money and dreams and failure, the book offers gems of wisdom about almost every facet of life. For example, your blogger has been battling a severe bout of bronchitis this past while, so when he dips into Gatsby he finds this: "And it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well." Great.