Sunday, April 17, 2011

Two recent electronic pieces on The Great Gatsby

 Like everyone else my age, I read The Great Gatsby in high school and thought, at the time, that it was OK. It took many years, and much more reading on my part, to realize how brilliant it is. (Maybe it's hard to appreciate genius until you've otherwise read a lot of crap—and it's hard to love a book you're required to read.)

A Studio 360 podcast I listened to a few weeks ago (originally broadcast last November) perked up my interest in Gatsby again:  American Icons: The Great Gatsby. An hour well spent.

This morning, CBS Sunday Morning did a segment, The end of an era for the "Gatsby house", about the demolition this weekend of the house on Long Island that inspired Fitzgerald's story. The segment offers just the right splash of clips from the Gatsby movie (thankfully no glimpse of Daisy/Mia Farrow), a little narration from the book, and archival photos of the house in its former glory.

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