The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Like I said, I did enjoy The Great Gatsby more than The House of Mirth.  Even though both were tragedies, we expected something like this with this novel, and with The House of Mirth, I never really expected that, or even her death.
      Both novels contained some seriously beautiful styles of diction, and I think I prefer F. Scott Fitzgerald's because his made more sense, probably because it was written twenty years closer to the modern age.  Specifically, Wharton did not really beautify Lily Bart's death, but Fitzgerald did.  I won't comment on that again because I think I already have like four times...  Two random examples of beautiful diction are "he came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor" (Fitzgerald, page 78) and "the great central lantern overhead shed a brightness on the women's hair and struck sparks from their jewels as they moved" (Wharton, page 19), though I could have flipped to a page at random and find a passage I love.
      I really enjoyed characters in both novels, except for Tom and Gus, both antagonists, but I did love even their descriptions and they way both authors brought their characters to life.
      And although this shouldn't really matter, it does when reading something for a class--the length of the novels.  At 180 smaller pages, The Great Gatsby is significantly shorter than The House of Mirth (268 pages), which I actually think should be longer because the last few scenes are so rushed with Lily and Selden's last encounter and her overdose and death.
      Thanks, Mr. Costello for assigning the way longer novel first...=)

      And one final comment on The Great Gatsby.  I totally think the person on the cover looks like a woman...  Why the red lips and dark eyes?  I did love the picture of the city, though, along the bottom.