15 Now-You-Know Facts That Cooked Our Noodles Good

It's been twenty years since I'd first read The Great Gatsby. I was twenty-one and it seemed that everyone was talking about it. It felt like the book to have in your back pocket. In the two years since I'd read it, though, I had fallen out of love with Fitzgerald's style, his prose which is so beautiful and lush. He makes it all seem effortless but there was a time when I didn't think this was true. When he first published The Great Gatsby, people called it overwritten—the story is told from Nick Carraway's perspective as he tries to understand Jay Gatsby's life while he visits Long Island. As Nick watches the lavish parties unfold around him, we see a side of New York rarely glimpsed by outsiders (in the form of Daisy Buchanan and her sister, Myrtle) and witness the slow dissolution of the young and beautiful, who are caught in the middle of what seems to be a dream.

But that's not why I remember the book. The real reason is that, on the inside cover, I wrote down a list of fifteen facts I couldn't stop thinking about. Here they are: