The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby follows Nick Carraway, who moves next door to the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby in 1920s Long Island and gets pulled into Gatsby's obsessive pursuit of his lost love, Daisy Buchanan. It's both a love story and a takedown of the American Dream, set against the glittering excess of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald's prose is beautiful but sharp, and the whole thing builds to a devastating climax that'll stick with you long after you finish. The book feels deceptively simple at first but reveals layers of meaning about wealth, class, and the corruption of idealism that make it worth revisiting. It's short enough to read in a sitting but dense enough to think about for years.