Fallen Angels #1

So, after finally wrapping up the Great Gatsby, I decided to choose a book I knew would interest me, Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers. The story follows a soldier named Richie Perry who is sent to Vietnam after enlisting for the military. The reason he enlists is to escape an uncertain future with his alcoholic mother who can’t afford to send him to college and to help support his younger brother, Kenny. On the military plane on route to the main U.S. headquarters in Vietnam Perry meets Harold Gates, also known as “Peewee” for his relatively small size. Although Peewee seems a little too energetic and quirky for Perry’s taste, the two realise they are stationed together and create a close friendship.

    Obviously this book is going to have as much action as it has emotion since it is about Vietnam and being told through a soldier’s eyes. The beginning sets up very well, showing that not all people who enlist in the military do it for sadistic purposes (which was what many protesters thought when the troops came home and treated them as such). In fact, many soldiers did it to do what Perry did, try and support their families who they either saw as declining or in desperate need of help from the start. Perry’s main purpose isn’t to fight and draw blood, it’s to use his military pay and benefits to help his brother Kennedy to make sure he gets a good education and a well paying job as the result of such that Perry feels he must provide to make up for his mother’s lack of ability to do. Through Peewee, however, we see this other side of ecstasy and potential sadism. Peewee says in the beginning that his main reason for coming is to be a patriot and fight the country’s enemies, which might explain why Perry doesn’t completely agree with Peewee’s motives. The books already off to a great pathological start and I hope this is not completely buried by any over the top action sequences or recurring/shoddy dialogue to try and draw it out.

The Great Gatsby #2

This week, I was able to reread the majority of The Great Gatsby ,by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and better analyze the full plot of the book. As stated last week, I had read a portion of The Great Gatsby but was unable to really grasp a plot due to the awkward dialogue no being clear on who was saying what. Now that I have reread a majority of the book, I can give you at least a partial recount of what is happening.

    My rereading of the book has also helped me find out what basic genre the book is: romance. Yes, of all the ways this book could have branched off, it had to be romance (and I had to be the unlucky guy to pick it up thinking it was going to be a psychological mystery). Anyway, the basic rundown is this: Nick, the main character and objective protagonist the book is told by, moves to New York to start a stock-broker business. He also ends up buying a house on Long Island near his cousin, Daisy. Daisy is married to her husband, Tom Buchanan. However, as Nick soon finds, they have quite a rocky marriage (as Tom often leaves the house alone to have an affair with a downtown mechanics wife). At one point, Jordan Baker, one of Daisy’s friends, mentions to Nick that he lives next door to a man who’s name is Jay Gatsby, an eccentric millionaire. Gatsby then personally invites Nick to one of his parties and meets him for the first time. A few days later, when Gatsby and Nick are having lunch, Gatsby mentions something about Daisy, to which Nick replies that she’s his cousin. Gatsby then shows that he has affections for her and wishes for her and him to meet at Nick’s place for tea so Gatsby can get better acquainted with Daisy. That is a basic summary of the story so far. In all, the book so far seems to be about how a couple wishes to be with other people but, for unexplained reasons, can’t divorce each other. I have a feeling this could get very dramatic very quickly the further I read.

Great Gatsby #1

This week, I was able to get my hands on and read one of the Great American book classics of the 1920s: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. From what I had heard from other people, The Great Gatsby was a book based around an eccentric yet benevolent millionaire in New York named Gatsby who has a mysterious past behind him that no one really knows the whole truth towards. This description, given to me by family and friends alike, made the book sound almost like a murder mystery, which was sort of the main reason I decided to pick it up. The other reason I decided to pick it up was because of its relatively recent setting of 1920s America (unlike Dickens and his 19th century England where every tree branch and corn field has a backstory that must be written in the story because he was paid by the word). That’s also a reason why I like Fitzgerald more than most of the Great American authors, he’s one of the more recent ones, making his books more relevant to modern day society than any other.

However, not everything people tell you is one hundred percent true. While Jay Gatsby is said to have a mysterious past and multiple rumors are spread about his past that all offer different theories on it, it’s not really delved into as much by the book’s central character, Nick, as if it were a part of the mystery genre. Rather, the book seems to focus on an enigmatic love “triangle” with Nick taking  an observational first-person point of view on the whole situation. Then there was the sentence structure. The structure of the vast majority of each sentence that involved multiple people’s dialogue were very cryptic to the point where a person could easily lose track of who was talking and when early on in the book. Unfortunately, it was so cryptic for me that I lost track of most of the explanations supporting the plot of the book and left me unsatisfied, as if all of the time I had spent reading had done nothing and had helped accomplish nothing for me. Because of this, I will be rereading the entire book over again to make sure nothing is overlooked.