This Side of Paradise

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1. jasonjamersonMar 2025
   Gatsby is great, of course, but for me, "This Side of Paradise" is far better. Underappreciated.
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2. pprbckwrtrApr 2016
   Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Joan Didion)

   Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes)

   The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (Paul Zindel)

   The Things They Carried (Tim O' Brien)

   This Side of Paradise (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

   Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury) Essentially a children's sci-fi novel, but it doesn't read that way.

   A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway)

   My personal favorite (along with his short stories, which I highly recommend), but if it's your first time reading Hemingway, might be better to go with The Sun Also Rises.

   Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates)

   On the Road (Jack Kerouac) *One of my personal favorites, but most people either love or hate it, so maybe save this towards the end.

   On my own reading list:

   Speedboat (Renata Adler)

   Money (Martin Amis)

   Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

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3. quuxplusoneJul 2026
   > It’s also probably been read by the majority of Americans, or at least the story is well-known.

   Read by, yes. Story well-known, I doubt. What is the story of The Great Gatsby, in a few words? (But then again, what is the story of the Iliad, anyway? Something about the wrath of Achilles, right?) [I should clarify: to answer that the Iliad is about "the Trojan war" or "Achilles dragging the body of Hector" seems insufficient to me in the same way it would be insufficient to say that Gatsby is about "a guy who throws parties" or "a murder in a swimming pool."]

   Twain is the obvious "American Homer" not just because his name pops immediately to mind, but also because his two best-known works (Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn) stand in the same relation to each other as the Iliad and Odyssey: a minor character in one becomes the protagonist of the other. As someone above already commented, too, both works are episodic and have given us many pop-culture images: I dare say only Tom's painting of the fence is proverbial, but the cave adventure, the feud, attending one's own funeral, and probably several more episodes are embedded in American pop culture to the same extent as the Cyclops, Circe, and the Lotus-Eaters. Gatsby is a great novel, but what has it given to our collective unconscious? The green light and... beautiful shirts?

   What does it say that there have been three adequate film adaptations of Gatsby, while there have been (as far as I know) none at all of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, the Iliad, or the Odyssey?

   (Side note: About 15 years ago I read Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned and thought it was very good and inventive; I recommend it. These days Wikipedia tells me that "many Fitzgerald scholars typically consider The Beautiful and Damned to be among the author's weaker novels," so maybe something excellent is waiting for me if I ever get around to reading This Side of Paradise or Tender is the Night.)

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4. FreakLegionJan 2026
   Fitzgerald's style is a pretty linear development out of early Joyce, say Dubliners and the first episodes of Ulysses. It compares to Woolf and McCarthy just fine.

   Your list reminds me of a joke from Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise:

     So
     Walter Arensberg,
     Alfred Kreymborg,
     Carl Sandburg,
     Louis Untermeyer,
     Eunice Tietjens,
     Clara Shanafelt,
     James Oppenheim,
     Maxwell Bodenheim,
     Richard Glaenzer,
     Scharmel Iris,
     Conrad Aiken,
     I place your names here
     So that you may live
     If only as names,
     Sinuous, mauve-colored names,
     In the Juvenalia
     Of my collected editions.

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5. MisterOctoberJan 2019
   ^ best one-sentence summation of this book I've ever seen.

   "Catcher" and "This Side of Paradise" are kind of a binary system for studying the pathology of American youth culture.

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6. ghaffJan 2019
   Admittedly didn’t read This Side of Paradise until grad school. But I definitely am much more of a Fitzgerald and Hemingway person and have zero desire to revisit Salinger.
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