Gatsby

   I note that Francis Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby  has been made into a movie.  No, not Robert Redford.  Sorry, another  movie.

   This was brought to mind by the fact that Doortje expressed a desire to read the novel this afternoon, so I delved into my epub files and found it.

   When a pdf file (basically photographs of the pages) is converted to epub, any page headers and footers are included as text, usually in the middle of the sentence running near the top or bottom of the page, which can be disconcerting to someone not used to the phenomenon.  

   For example, you get "The Great Gatsby" written in the middle of the sentence at the beginning of every right-hand page and "Chapter 1" or whatever in the middle of the sentence at the beginning of every left-hand page, and the page numbers at the bottom, also in the middle of the sentence.  When I realised this was the case with The Great Gatsby, I wacked it into a program that I have (Sigil), converted the headers and footers into easily recognised strings and then proceeded to remove them.

   In an hour and a half, the job was done (probably the time it takes to read the novel!), and the epub version looked respectable, and ready for the eReader.

   Then it occurred to me to look in the bookshelf!  It would be very surprising if we didn't have a Penguin of this book from way back.  Sure enough, it wasn't hard to find, and Doortje expressed pleasure at being able to read the real book!

   Anyway, skimming through the novel in Sigil got me to my favourite line in the book, in chapter 7, which is: 

"O, my Ga-od! O, my Ga-od! Oh, Ga-od! Oh, my Gaod!"

   What could be more expressive in an American novel?

    And as far as movies go, The Eye of the Storm (also about rich people) was made into a beautiful ABC telemovie by Fred Schepisi not long ago and the Australian public hardly noticed.

  

   Just to put my biases on the table, I rate George Orwell and Patrick White highly, but not F. Scott.