I don’t remember the first time I read The Great Gatsby, but I know that my awe of F. Scott Fitzgerald goes back to my own adolescence. Tidbits of biography, the ubiquity of The Great Gatsby in bookstores, references to the Jazz Age invariably tied, in some fashion, to Fitzgerald—these things combined in my mind to form a misty halo around this hallowed writer, a halo that implied divine standing but was dissociated (for me, anyway) from the author’s bibliography, since the The Great Gatsby was not required reading at my high school. (Hard to believe, but true.)

Although I’ve read it at least three times since then, I still marvel at the elegant simplicity of its story, the perfect pacing and the careful timing of its plot, the pairings and the constructed contrasts between its characters, and, most of all, the melt in your mouth prose of the book. Yes, it’s tied to a particular time in American history (as well as to the conventions and the pop culture of that period), but its themes, while they’re flavored with Americana, are hopelessly universal.

The Great Gatsby belongs to a very select group of books, in my mind, that not only sum up what a novel can achieve in a small space but which push the traditional form of the novel to its limit, squeezing precise and tangible meaning from every word, every sentence, every paragraph. It is such a joy to read that I can say, without any doubt, that I know I will read it again.