This Side of Paradise

By: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Narrated by: David McCallion

Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins

Publisher's summary

F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel This Side of Paradise was published in 1920 and quickly became a best-seller. This book's popularity has often been linked to the lifestyle of the youth at the time. It was the beginning of the roaring 1920s, and This Side of Paradise embodied all the fun and excitement of the era.

Carefree, party loving Amory Blaine leaves his home in Minnesota for Princeton University, with his sight set on a high-energy career in New York City. At Princeton, the ambitious and self-centered Amory longs to be included with the popular crowd, and become one of those he views as entitled, but along the way, he indulges in a string of romances with beautiful, young women.

While chasing his golden dream, Amory's youth is slipping away, along with the past. Will young Amory understand how fleeting life is before it is too late?

Public Domain (P)2017 A.R.N. Publications

Slow start, but finished strong

I wasn't quite hooked from the beginning, it kind of dragged on a bit for awhile. I definetly was not a fan of Amory, the main character, much during the first part of the book, and even at the end there's things about him I don't like, but he certainly improves quite a bit. The narrator was fine when reading the standard text, but the way he read dialogue was very distracting -- *especially* his attempt at speaking in a woman's voice. This was mostly made up for by the fact that I couldn't stop imagining that Mark Corrigan from Peep Show was reading to me, as the narrator quite sounds like the actor. Overall, it was enjoyable and worth the few hours of time.

Obscure, obtuse.

Only worth listening if you're fascinated by the intellectual life of the American upper class on the early 1900s.

Awful Narration

Voice for female characters is bad. Doesn’t serve the story and is annoying. Pathetic attempt should be flagged to warn future subscribers.

Turgid

A couldn't find anything redeeming about either the text or the performance. Fitzgerald is wearyingly long-winded at times, with interminable digressions on the protagonists's state of mind, and inexplicably abrupt at others just when incidents of real interest seem to be unfolding. Long passages of dubious poetry punctuate the narrative but add little to the experience. McCallion's reading is stilted in a way that is hard to explain, but the dialogues fall completely flat. His style works well with Wodehouse but is totally mismatched with this subject matter, which might have gone down a bit more palatably with a more natural, conversational style. You will find it very difficult to care a toss about Amory's fate but no doubt he became one of those Marxist academics that haunt the Ivy League halls to this day.

Awful narration

I was disappointed by this book. Fitzgerald was only 22 when he wrote it and although there are some wonderful sentences, his youth shows through. The main character is an egotistical, entitiled, privileged kid who gradually grows up but retains an unappealing egocentricity. The narration is often snarky and the efforts to portray a woman's voice are cringe inducing and distracting. The narrator sometimes races through the language making it difficult to savor.