It’s the story of an outsider who gives up everything in order to join the “in crowd”, and at the end finds that it was all meaningless. I think this is impactful because it forces the reader (or at least, forced me) to deeply consider what _I_ wanted out of life, instead of what others want, or what seems conventional.
The crowd is only a way to impress her, old sports.
I also read it in high school and I recall spending about half the book muttering "oh my God, Gatsby, there are so many other women in the world get over yourself."
It's a whole show of people dying on the streets by 20.
And also about the indifference that generational wealth has towards amusing interlopers that provide fleeting excitement to their women
I love it and want these privileges
Yes, it seems easier to relate to them after encountering more “careless people” as an adult.
I'm okay with some assigned reading, but it would be nice if the assignments could make room for students to choose their own reading. Like, she would have to write down a bunch of new words she encountered--she can do that just as well with the books she chose herself.
I got diagnosed at 19
I went from having never read a fiction book cover to cover to finishing DFW’s Infinite Jest
I still did remarkably well in English in highschool, because luckily reading skills =/= writing skills
A book about what happiness means and how and if you can ever shape and re-shape yourself to pursue it. Only the quote in the afterword really stood out to me, and I later learn that that's not even in the book; it's in the 50's movie adaptation:
>“There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you’ve never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start over again.”
The rest was more slice of life details about the roaring 20's. That quickly escalates when the Rich dude lends his car to someone else and he runs over someone. Rich dude takes the bullet in revenge when the husband of the run over person takes revenge.
The guy who is working to make ends meet is the narrator, Nick Carraway. Daisy is his cousin, which is why he gets to hang around these much more wealthy people. Of course, the way he is working to make ends meet is as a bond salesman on Wall Street, but at the time bonds were a sleepy corner of the financial system, it didn't become the ticket to enormous wealth until the 1980s.
Similarly, another reference that made sense at the time but is lost to the modern reader is the book's reference to Gatsby making his money in drug stores- that meant he was a bootlegger. You could get a doctor's order for alcohol so drug stores were legal speakeasy's. Walgreen's in particular did absurdly well under prohibition, growing from 20 stores in 1920 to 400 stores in 1930, on the basis of its medicinal whiskey, available to anyone with a prescription.
I sure hope this is dead and buried. I couldn't imagine anything more dire than literature being reduced to a mirror reflecting back the (presumably young and intellectually deprived) readers sad little life back at them.
I was privileged enough to grow up in what I'll call the LeVar Burton school of literary interpretation: books are a window into a world entirely unlike your own where you can be Zhuang Zhou dreaming he is a butterfly. What’s more interesting: every book being about being a dull little high schooler, or any book being about anything: Farm animals reproducing the Russian revolution, European nobles murdering each other over random points of honor, being totally psyched for war and finding out you’re a giant pussy, navigating the world of being a mentally unstable prep school girl in the 1960s... entire universes of totally inaccessible experiences made possible through the magic of the novel.
In South Africa many of my now middle-aged HS friends, most of whom subsequently graduated university and have successful careers, used study guides for English literature (a handful would recycle essays from older siblings), and are proud that they have never read a fiction book.
English teachers and romantics like the author of this piece seem to place a lot of value in the teaching of literature, but the Common Core actually seems to be on the right track:
At the same time, in an effort to promote “college and career readiness,” the Common Core State Standards Initiative, launched in 2010 and currently implemented in forty-one states, recommends that students mainly read “informational texts” (nonfiction, journalism, speeches)
No point in pretending that the average student has the same hobbies/interests as their English-major teacher.
Of course, there's a reason we don't do this anymore. It's a weird trade off between "incentivizing studying for test" and "probability of discrimination". And the big point of the last century was decreasing the latter.
Go back and read all those books you were supposed to have read in high school.
It turns out, they are actually really good. And now you're old enough and have had enough life experience to understand and relate to them.
I remember kinda liking "The Sun Also Rises" in highschool literature class. There were these people travelling around Spain and drinking a lot. I could relate. At some point in my late 20s, I came across a copy and read it again. Turns out it's an awesome book, and about more than just swilling wine.
So the thought occurred that since one of those terrible highschool literature books was good, maybe more of them would be. I grabbed The Great Gatsby. Awesome book. Whatever JD Sallinger thing they had us read. Awesome. Joseph Conrad, Jack London, Oscar Wilde. Hell yeah. And all those authors had tons of other great stuff they'd written. And there were lots of authors in the last hundred-odd years. It kinda kicked off a lifetime of seeking out the Good Stuff.
One minor downside, as long as we're doing a PSA, is that doing this will kill your ability to read Airport Bestsellers of any genre. You'll need actual good writing from here on out. Fortunately, there's lots of people still doing that so they should be able to crank out new good books faster than you can read them.
I guess it depends on the goal. My opinion is that reading hard books at school simply turns people off reading completely. If the reading is fun there's more chance students will carry on reading.
So if the goal is "teach kids that reading is fun. So they do it. Which means their ability to read goes up" , then yes, the books should be more fun.
(We read a Spike Milligan book, which certainly engaged the class more than Wuthering Heights did.)
On the other hand if the goal is to understand "literature", then books with themes and character development and so on is necessary. And of course can put some kids off reading for life.
Half the pleasure of reading these books as they were meant to be read (as books, and not at frogs to be dissected in class) is that you get to discover it for yourself--a mix of life-changing gems and I-guess-you-had-to-be-there meditations on being a failson in the twilight of British imperialism
Whether it's in the lifetime of the author or not (usually not) in which it's appreciated, a hypothetical reviewer of books must have had to drudge through some pretty bad ones before getting to the good
The old debate over whether music really used to be better (honestly yes if only because of less consolidation of radio stations) or whether we only remember the good ones because we've already assigned the bad ones to the trash heap
When I first was forced to read it in high school, I didn’t get it, didn’t understand it, didn’t have the emotional capacity or life experience to grasp it.
I re-read it as an adult after experiencing heartbreak, it really resonated. I could understand what Gatsby was going through and it became my #1 favorite book (even though I prefer sci-fi novels)
Fitzgerald’s prose in Gatsby is also almost perfect. The book is so short because he kept cutting it down and cutting it down, editing away, chipping and refining it. What’s fascinating too is nearly every sentence is beautiful prose. Most people write and it sounds like jumbled nuggets of stuff. Fitzgerald worked to get it to sound beautiful. It is an amazing work of art for me.
This is, of course, the obvious thesis of the book. But it didn't really hit me until I looked at America from the outside, as this Thing existing with its own rules and ecosystem, separate from but still exerting a massive influence on the rest of the world. Before that point, it was a bit like a fish thinking about water.
Later I found out that Fitzgerald wrote most of the novel while in southern France, which makes perfect sense.
So if you ever find yourself as an American abroad – definitely read Gatsby.
pseudolus•17h ago