The Great Gatsby Reading Journal: Blog Post 1 - Before Reading.

May 30, 2009 at 2:32am

I can't help it. Particularly, before reading, I need to have an idea of what the book will be about and with which subjects it is concerned. So, I like reading about the author's life first and how this has influenced his or her works. Some people are against doing this because they say we shouldn't be influenced by other people's ideas and that we should try, instead, to make sense of the narrative we are reading by ourselves. Nevertheless, I've been doing some research, reading about Fitzgerald and the Roaring 20s, the Jazz Age and Martine's review of the Great Gatsby in goodreads.com.
I like History a lot so I'm looking forward to see this aspect in the book and being able to undestand it better through the descriptions of the feelings and lives of the characters that I think will appear in it. Then, I'd like to see if anything of the things that I predict might happen in this story are taking place nowadays or if they happened at some point near in time, if I can relate the events to some aspect of my own life, or maybe my friends' or family's too.