This side of paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Having ploughed through a couple of books that fell short of expectations, I picked on this as being a quick read and pretty much a banker in terms of satisfaction (and also because it had twice come up, once as the answer to a crossword clue and once as a question on Mastermind - or maybe it was University Challenge. Fate's serendipitous finger seemed to command. Anyway...).  I was fairly sure I would enjoy it, having read it before.

Which is where I was wrong. The date inside the book - the date I bought it - is January 1973 and I expect that I read it soon after. In 1973, I was not far off the age of the protagonist and not far off the age of the author when he wrote it, and I thought it was wonderful. I thought that life really was like that, or would shortly become so. This brilliant scintillating intellectual society with its bright young things was waiting for me just around the corner. By heck, I was going to be a bright young thing too.

Given the many annotations in the margins, I read it for a module on my university course. The comments are fair - it is stylishly written, nice turns of phrase, etc. But, forty years on, the protagonist is no longer a hero, but a snobby little prat who could do with a slap; and the writing style grates as it tries so hard to be witty. I lost all sympathy with it long before the end and I don't know if I mourn more for the loss of reading pleasure or for my own lost naivety. I never was, and now never will be, a bright young thing.