I jumped into This Side of Paradise right out of The Hunger Games, and I liked it at first. Then it got tedious. It reminds me of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but without a cohesive plot. It’s a series of little vignettes about a kid who grows up and goes to college with the precursors of characters in The Great Gatsby. And it’s really, really boring. It’s Fitzgerald, though, so the writing is stellar, but 60 pages in, there still wasn’t enough of a plot to keep me interested. So I’m moving on. I’m not sure if my problem right now is that I just didn’t like the book or that I’m a bit burnt out on reading, but we’ll soon see. Next up is Mr. Spaceman, which comes highly recommended by a librarian friend of mine.
