So We Read On

How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures

By: Maureen Corrigan

Narrated by: Maureen Corrigan

Conceived nearly a century ago by a man who died believing himself a failure, it's now a revered classic and a rite of passage in the reading lives of millions. But how well do we really know The Great Gatsby? As Maureen Corrigan, Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out, while Fitzgerald's masterpiece may be one of the most popular novels in America, many of us first read it when we were too young to fully comprehend its power.

Offering a fresh perspective on what makes Gatsby great - and utterly unusual - So We Read On takes us into archives, high school classrooms, and even out onto the Long Island Sound to explore the novel's hidden depths, a journey whose revelations include Gatsby's surprising debt to hard-boiled crime fiction, its rocky path to recognition as a "classic", and its profound commentaries on the national themes of race, class, and gender.

With rigor, wit, and infectious enthusiasm, Corrigan inspires us to re-experience the greatness of Gatsby and cuts to the heart of why we are, as a culture, "borne back ceaselessly" into its thrall. Along the way, she spins a new and fascinating story of her own.

©2014 Maureen Corrigan (P)2014 Hachette Audio

Critic reviews

"Immensely likable, eclectic, and dynamic, Corrigan is as adept in her analysis of life as she is in her fresh and significant interpretations of books." (Booklist)

"Maureen Corrigan has produced a minor miracle: a book about The Great Gatsby that stands up to Gatsby itself." (Michael Cunningham)

"Corrigan's eclectic taste and skillful assessment of new writers as well as those long dead are particularly astute." - ( USA Today)

"Corrigan is erudite without being the least bit pretentious... Dipping into Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading is a little like visiting that friend whose house is always full of books and who always sends you home with one you're excited to read." ( Detroit Free-Press)

"Maureen Corrigan's brilliant Gatsby book takes you on a revealing expedition into the wilds of American literary culture. It might be called How Gatsby became "Great". An intoxicating cocktail of talent, celebrity, gangster noir, and the vicissitudes of reputation that create a classic." (Ron Rosenbaum, author of The Shakespeare Wars)

"So We Read On is a fine book on many levels, almost too many to list. This book is a love story about a book. It's an expression of love for one of the most lyrical and engaging and prescient novels in the English language. Maureen Corrigan writes not only with passion about her subject, she writes with an understanding of America and the elusive goal represented by the green light on Daisy's dock." (James Lee Burke)

"A brilliant and funny narrative of [Corrigan's] own reading life . . . Utterly original." ( Chicago Tribune)

"With her infectious enthusiasm, no one is better at bringing a book to life than Maureen Corrigan. Her vividly personal evocation of Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby is at once a labor of love, the story of a quest, and a mother lode of information and insight. As a biography of a novel, it reads like a novel." (Morris Dickstein, author of Gates of Eden and Dancing in the Dark)

Amazing and rich

I am so grateful to have “read” this book. I am coteaching Gatsby for my second and last time because I am retiring, and it has been so helpful. I have walked listening to it and had to stop to take notes on my phone. Thank you, Maureen Corrigan for so many lessons!

I love everything Gatsby

Okay, so like tell me more about the gay interpretations of Gatsby? This feels like an introduction for me to go a bit deeper but didn’t really give any satisfying answers. Now, on the other hand, there is this audible original that is free on “who is jay Gatsby” and goes into this odd theory — and that gave me more than this but. It wasn’t bad. It felt like that tourist attraction she went on at Gatsby bay or what not. It showed me all these cool things but didn’t go deeper. I want more!! But maybe that’s the point is that it’s inexhaustible. It’s deep, it’s riveting and the audience wants more. Yup, I agree. Fast read, that’s a five star for me.

Exquisite - A Journey Into Fitzgerald and Gatsby

It’s been a few years since I read Gatsby and a friend recommended this book to me.

It’s a wonderful book excellently read by the author.

Enough review though... I’ve dug out my 20 year old paperback of Gatsby and I’m starting to reread it and revel in it.

tttttttttttttttyyyyyyy

ttttgggghjjnbfcggbbgbbnnn. think. http. then. there thigh thigh hugged think think seeds deserving !k think death thinking deer seeds

Charming!

This is a charming treatment of the Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life, and the author’s own experiences. It blends together pleasantly and encourages subsequent listens to the book in question.

Interseting and engaging

What did you like best about this story?

I loved the insights the author had on The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald. Also I enjoyed the personal connections she shares.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

I found this to be a good book to work to, like house work or home improvement project or a road trip.

Any additional comments?

I would love this book to be given to everyone who says they don't understand what the draw is to Gatsby. She does a great job of getting to the heart of the matter.

Thoroughly enjoyed this!

This was a pleasure to listen to. It accompanied me everywhere. Sometimes I'd put it down for a while
thinking it would be hard to pick up again but Corrigan always lured be back in with her enthusiasm for Fitzgerald and the interesting asides she would add. This was not a dry analysis but a story in itself. Her love for The Great Gatsby and its author is infectious. I'm definitely going to read it again. Maureen Corrigan is right. Every time you read the novel you see something different.

Lovely

I was unfamiliar with Corrigan but this have insightful background information, interesting biographical accounts, and made my re-reading of Gatsby more nuanced and aware. If readers could reply, Corrigan would have her Gatsby seminar at last.

The Great American Novel: An Orgastic Argument

Professor Corrigan, book critic for NPR and Georgetown professor, loves THE GREAT GATSBY, as do I. I devoured her delightful, didactic book on how and why it's the **Great American Novel** because, among other things, it splendidly captured Americans' quotidian desires for the *American dream,* our desire for desire ("there are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired") and our quixotic belief, or perhaps subconscious romanticizing, that we can somehow recapture or relive the past, especially past loves (as Gatsby said to Nick, "Can't repeat the past? ... Why of course you can!").


------- "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--to-morrow we will run faster, stretch our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning------

-------- "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."


Ms. Corrigan also provides a scintillating exploration of the author's tragic life and death and why, like many supremely talented artists before him, F. Scott Fitzgerald died in the depths of depression and perceived by himself and many others as a mediocre, has-been, with the splendor of his masterpiece unrecognized (by most) until several years after his death and yet endures as the most studied piece of literature in U.S. secondary education.

I highly recommend this book if you enjoyed The Great Gatsby or if you are fascinated with early 20th century America.

Eye opening and revealing

I discovered this book while perusing a recent Audible sale. At first glance, it didn't seem like something I would pick but as I read the summary, about Maureen, and listener's reviews, I became very curious and seriously interested to learn more. Like most of the reviewers, I too had read The Great Gatsby in high school but was lost on any deep meaning of it at that time. Maureen is superb at providing the true historical facts of the era in which it was written, while explaining what was simultaneously happening in Scott Fitzerald's life as it impacted the story. I couldn't agree more with one of her final thoughts, that perhaps there is a different Gatsby for us to "get" when we read it at different stages of our own lives, and this is why the story continues to endure as one of the greats. Give it a try, and I bet you get caught up in it quickly and become inspired to read/listen to The Great Gatsby again, with new eyes.