Sploosh - Summer Classic Reads

Summer is the perfect time to finally read that classic book you've been meaning to read. Novels written centuries ago are still popular with readers, and for good reason. Today's suggested titles are two iconic American stories, and both evoke the haunting and powerful feelings of long forgotten summers:


The Great Gatsby
By F. Scott Fitzgerald

"He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was . . ." The Great Gatsby (1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald''s masterpiece, stands among the greatest of all American fiction. Jay Gatsby''s lavish lifestyle in a mansion on Long Island''s gold coast encapsulates the spirit, excitement, and violence of the era Fitzgerald named `the Jazz Age''. Impelled by his love for Daisy Buchanan, Gatsby seeks nothing less than to recapture the moment five years earlier when his best and brightest dreams - his `unutterable visions'' - seemed to be incarnated in her kiss. A moving portrayal of the power of romantic imagination, as well as the pathos and courage entailed in the pusuit of an unattainable dream, The Great Gatsby is a classic fiction of hope and disillusion. This edition is fully annotated with a fine Introduction incorporating new interpretation and detailing Fitzgerald''s struggle to write the novel, its critical reception and its significance for future generations.

Check this book out from BPL.




The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
By Mark Twain

Hilariously picaresque, epic in scope, alive with the poetry and vigor of the American people, Mark Twain''s story about a young boy and his journey down the Mississippi was the first great novel to speak in a truly American voice. Influencing subsequent generations of writers -- from Sherwood Anderson to Twain''s fellow Missourian, T.S. Eliot, from Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner to J.D. Salinger -- Huckleberry Finn, like the river which flows through its pages, is one of the great sources which nourished and still nourishes the literature of America.

Check this book out from BPL.