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.
This reply rings true, but also had me thinking. If rereading those books when you're old enough makes you appreciate them, are they ideal for high school? Do they teach you what's good writing if you can't recognize it yet? Does it make sense to, then, choose different books - books you can appreciate and understand more in high school? I don't have the right answer, but the question seemed relevant.
>> Does it make sense to, then, choose different books - books you can appreciate and understand more in high school?
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.
Do you have a list of books you can recommend? (I was born and raised in Russia, so I imagine my school books list is quite different from yours; I would, of course, like to read from both.)
100% agree with you that it's worth going back and reading The Books You Should Read as an adult who can just read them as books and not some sort of obligation. That said. some of them are still stinkers that only a weird boomer could love. I'm looking at you, A Separate Peace & fucking anything by Joseph Conrad (sorry).
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
I have a radical insight on this topic: contemporary books and media are good and worth analysing and teaching to students. We are really biased towards old books for some reason and old books have this quality of being completely un relatable.
I remember teachers in my school having a poor opinion, dissuading us from reading contemporary books. I'm still not convinced on their rationale.
I don't want to read a Dickens book or Gatsby, I want to read a book that is relatable, that I can understand, that I can have fun reading. Of course, it should not be too easy in which case there is nothing to gain from it academically. For example, a relatable contemporary book might cover contemporary problems like social media, teen angst, technology would sit better with high school students.
We need to think: why not teach Game Of Thrones or Harry Potter? What makes them an inherently worse choice than Charles Dickens? Game of Thrones certainly has intricate characters and a nice story line.
From the article: It was also a matter of method. Education scholars often narrate the development of high-school-English pedagogy as a clash between two competing schools of thought. On one side is the “student-centered” approach typified by the education professor Louise M. Rosenblatt and her 1938 book, “Literature as Exploration,” which emphasized the resonances between the work and each reader’s individual experience."
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.
On one hand I agree with you. But upon reading a bit about "Literature as Exploration" you mentioned, I can't help but agree with her point also.
Its cool to expose kids to new and interesting world views that they might not come across. But we really really need to validate whether making a kid read books like Moby Dick is worth it? Do kids really need to read intense books or just have fun? What good is introducing a book that is not relatable in the slightest?
I don't think I've related to any other book more. When I was growing up my mom worked for a country club, and my dad was a mechanic who restored cars for the wealthy. They were divorced, so I would split my time between houses. My mom did a little better for herself than he did, so I was with her most of the time so I could go to better schools. I would meet the people who owned the cars my dad worked on, and I would go to my mom's country club sometimes and lend a hand. I was in a haunted house one year, and a part time caddy. Just constantly around this world, and those people, and their haunts, and their toys, and their kids, going to school with them. I understand this isn't all the book is about, but it spoke to the emotional experience of feeling like you have to change who you are and hide where you come from to try and fit in with people who can smell your station and may never (at the time, won't ever) accept you. I felt like I grew up in the valley of the ashes.
I read the Great Gatsby in high school. Or tried to. I may have resorted to Cliffs Notes. I can't even remember. I can't remember one thing about that novel, other than the title. The words crossed my retinas but made no impression beyond that. Just could not engage with it at all. And I liked reading, just not the stuff they assigned in English class.
That makes me very sad, it is one of my favorite books. I know an internet stranger is unlikely to convince you, but here’s my endorsement:
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.
Wow. That’s a really important message. Unfortunately, I didn’t get that at all when I read it. I just read about some dude that wanted to party with the rich kids. And I was trying to pay attention and got good grades. The issue might be that I simply wasn’t emotionally intelligent at the time to understand, and I think that was the case for most of us. Or maybe just me…
I feel a lot of "literature" reading may reflect experiences a high school student (generously) may not relate to, or (less generously) may not have the life experiences to understand, and may not necessarily gain by reading?
Reminds me of The Wire, when DeAngelo Barksdake discussing the meaning of the quote "there are no second acts in American lives".[1] It's a roomful of prisoners that only grasped that once their first act was over.
It's a whole show of people dying on the streets by 20.
You may also have already had experiences that formed the notion that being part of the in crowd wasn't worth it.
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."
I read The Great Gatsby recently for the first time and didn't enjoy it even slightly, probably because of its focus on status. Or maybe because I'm an engineer type from New Zealand? I decided to read the book because it's a classic, and occasionally I find a classic I absolutely love (often when I start with low expectations). Loved Catch 22, love anything by Steinbeck (although I would generally avoid US classic books - maybe due to my colonial background).
I read it a long time ago and like you have very little recollection of it. However in high school we also read Homer and several plays by Shakespeare and remember a lot of details - I think my English teachers did a great job of explaining the context and chairing our discussions about those other works. I was thinking it’s hard to relate to Tom and Daisy in high school but then the other works are separated from us by culture and centuries (though to be fair translations we read for Homer are each a work in themselves)
My daughter was reading a trilogy when this school year started; she had finished the first book and was excited about it. Unfortunately, her teacher this year demanded a lot of reading, and only from books she approved of, so my daughter never had a chance to read the other books in the trilogy. It's been an endless deluge of assigned books, some she likes, some she dislikes. The teacher made no effort to facilitate students reading things they were personally interested in. Sad. At least now that the school year is ending she can finally read what she wants.
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.
2 Dudes. Girl. One dude becomes rich and throws parties, but is incomplete without Girl. Other dude (the main character, technically) works to make ends meet, but marries Girl. Rich dude connects with married dude to get close to Girl. That's the main motif at least.
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.
I think you've missed a person in your account. The guy Daisy marries is not working to make ends meet, he's an old-money racist (Tom mixes up Henry Goddard, one of the most famous proponents of eugenics in the 1910's and 1920's, and Lothrup Stoddard's book _The Rising Tide of Color_ which inspired Adolf Hitler, but liked both, even if he can't remember who wrote what). Tom Buchanan is just as fantastically wealthy as Gatsby but in the understated old-money ways, contrasting with Gatsby's new money extravagance. Tom conducts an affair with a nearby, much poorer woman, but is enraged at the hint that Daisy is having an affair with Gatsby. The combination of his affair and his anger at the possibility of her affair is what drives the novel to its explosive climax.
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.
Many high school assigned kind of books are really difficult to experience well before you've had a little more life experience, Gatsby is one of them.
the good news is that the book is very short and an easy weekend read and also recently in the public domain. which may be prompting a bunch of online content about it.
I know this is kinda tone deaf to ask in a section about books, but: how was the Leonardo DiCaprio modern adaption? I read the book and was well out of college when it premiered, but I never had much interest in seeing it at the time. Does it do the book justice, or at least the much much older adaptation?
I liked Gatsby in school, but I really didn't get it until living outside of America for awhile. To me it's the perfect encapsulation of the American experience: striving to escape the past while inevitably being pulled down by it.
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.
It sounds like a universal experience in high school is students not reading assigned literature.
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.
The purpose of school is to prepare students to pass whatever selection filter top colleges and universities employ. Schools dropping literature means higher education institutions aren't admitting students on the basis of literature knowledge. No point in wasting time studying something if it's not going to help students pass tests.
That could be offset if we moved away from standardized tests. I think I would prefer verbal exams and vibe checks.
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.
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.
It's kind of interesting how some books, compared to others, become classics
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
https://archive.ph/kQKvv
A quick Public Service Announcement:
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.
This reply rings true, but also had me thinking. If rereading those books when you're old enough makes you appreciate them, are they ideal for high school? Do they teach you what's good writing if you can't recognize it yet? Does it make sense to, then, choose different books - books you can appreciate and understand more in high school? I don't have the right answer, but the question seemed relevant.
>> Does it make sense to, then, choose different books - books you can appreciate and understand more in high school?
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.
Fair point, but I also think initial exposure to things you don’t yet understand is a useful step towards understanding them.
Do you have a list of books you can recommend? (I was born and raised in Russia, so I imagine my school books list is quite different from yours; I would, of course, like to read from both.)
Idk, Dickens and Melville are pretty hard to get through.
100% agree with you that it's worth going back and reading The Books You Should Read as an adult who can just read them as books and not some sort of obligation. That said. some of them are still stinkers that only a weird boomer could love. I'm looking at you, A Separate Peace & fucking anything by Joseph Conrad (sorry).
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
I have a radical insight on this topic: contemporary books and media are good and worth analysing and teaching to students. We are really biased towards old books for some reason and old books have this quality of being completely un relatable.
I remember teachers in my school having a poor opinion, dissuading us from reading contemporary books. I'm still not convinced on their rationale.
I don't want to read a Dickens book or Gatsby, I want to read a book that is relatable, that I can understand, that I can have fun reading. Of course, it should not be too easy in which case there is nothing to gain from it academically. For example, a relatable contemporary book might cover contemporary problems like social media, teen angst, technology would sit better with high school students.
We need to think: why not teach Game Of Thrones or Harry Potter? What makes them an inherently worse choice than Charles Dickens? Game of Thrones certainly has intricate characters and a nice story line.
From the article: It was also a matter of method. Education scholars often narrate the development of high-school-English pedagogy as a clash between two competing schools of thought. On one side is the “student-centered” approach typified by the education professor Louise M. Rosenblatt and her 1938 book, “Literature as Exploration,” which emphasized the resonances between the work and each reader’s individual experience."
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.
On one hand I agree with you. But upon reading a bit about "Literature as Exploration" you mentioned, I can't help but agree with her point also.
Its cool to expose kids to new and interesting world views that they might not come across. But we really really need to validate whether making a kid read books like Moby Dick is worth it? Do kids really need to read intense books or just have fun? What good is introducing a book that is not relatable in the slightest?
I don't think I've related to any other book more. When I was growing up my mom worked for a country club, and my dad was a mechanic who restored cars for the wealthy. They were divorced, so I would split my time between houses. My mom did a little better for herself than he did, so I was with her most of the time so I could go to better schools. I would meet the people who owned the cars my dad worked on, and I would go to my mom's country club sometimes and lend a hand. I was in a haunted house one year, and a part time caddy. Just constantly around this world, and those people, and their haunts, and their toys, and their kids, going to school with them. I understand this isn't all the book is about, but it spoke to the emotional experience of feeling like you have to change who you are and hide where you come from to try and fit in with people who can smell your station and may never (at the time, won't ever) accept you. I felt like I grew up in the valley of the ashes.
I read the Great Gatsby in high school. Or tried to. I may have resorted to Cliffs Notes. I can't even remember. I can't remember one thing about that novel, other than the title. The words crossed my retinas but made no impression beyond that. Just could not engage with it at all. And I liked reading, just not the stuff they assigned in English class.
That makes me very sad, it is one of my favorite books. I know an internet stranger is unlikely to convince you, but here’s my endorsement:
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.
Wow. That’s a really important message. Unfortunately, I didn’t get that at all when I read it. I just read about some dude that wanted to party with the rich kids. And I was trying to pay attention and got good grades. The issue might be that I simply wasn’t emotionally intelligent at the time to understand, and I think that was the case for most of us. Or maybe just me…
I feel a lot of "literature" reading may reflect experiences a high school student (generously) may not relate to, or (less generously) may not have the life experiences to understand, and may not necessarily gain by reading?
Reminds me of The Wire, when DeAngelo Barksdake discussing the meaning of the quote "there are no second acts in American lives".[1] It's a roomful of prisoners that only grasped that once their first act was over.
It's a whole show of people dying on the streets by 20.
[1]https://youtu.be/8DOy4hCih7w
You may also have already had experiences that formed the notion that being part of the in crowd wasn't worth it.
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."
My interpretation is, that he does not want to join the "in crowd" but to impress a girl and this is his undoing.
The crowd is only a way to impress her, old sports.
I think GP is talking about Nick, the book's narrator.
I read The Great Gatsby recently for the first time and didn't enjoy it even slightly, probably because of its focus on status. Or maybe because I'm an engineer type from New Zealand? I decided to read the book because it's a classic, and occasionally I find a classic I absolutely love (often when I start with low expectations). Loved Catch 22, love anything by Steinbeck (although I would generally avoid US classic books - maybe due to my colonial background).
Its also about selling bonds, which is still very overlooked in retail trader’s social climbing schemes. Specifically, issuing bonds
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
I read it a long time ago and like you have very little recollection of it. However in high school we also read Homer and several plays by Shakespeare and remember a lot of details - I think my English teachers did a great job of explaining the context and chairing our discussions about those other works. I was thinking it’s hard to relate to Tom and Daisy in high school but then the other works are separated from us by culture and centuries (though to be fair translations we read for Homer are each a work in themselves)
> I was thinking it’s hard to relate to Tom and Daisy in high school…
Yes, it seems easier to relate to them after encountering more “careless people” as an adult.
My daughter was reading a trilogy when this school year started; she had finished the first book and was excited about it. Unfortunately, her teacher this year demanded a lot of reading, and only from books she approved of, so my daughter never had a chance to read the other books in the trilogy. It's been an endless deluge of assigned books, some she likes, some she dislikes. The teacher made no effort to facilitate students reading things they were personally interested in. Sad. At least now that the school year is ending she can finally read what she wants.
She wasn’t allowed to read other books in her free time?
The assigned reading burned her out on reading.
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.
What free time? If teachers ever heard of a kid having any they'd make sure to assign more homework.
You can only read so much before your time or stamina is exhausted.
2 Dudes. Girl. One dude becomes rich and throws parties, but is incomplete without Girl. Other dude (the main character, technically) works to make ends meet, but marries Girl. Rich dude connects with married dude to get close to Girl. That's the main motif at least.
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.
I think you've missed a person in your account. The guy Daisy marries is not working to make ends meet, he's an old-money racist (Tom mixes up Henry Goddard, one of the most famous proponents of eugenics in the 1910's and 1920's, and Lothrup Stoddard's book _The Rising Tide of Color_ which inspired Adolf Hitler, but liked both, even if he can't remember who wrote what). Tom Buchanan is just as fantastically wealthy as Gatsby but in the understated old-money ways, contrasting with Gatsby's new money extravagance. Tom conducts an affair with a nearby, much poorer woman, but is enraged at the hint that Daisy is having an affair with Gatsby. The combination of his affair and his anger at the possibility of her affair is what drives the novel to its explosive climax.
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.
Many high school assigned kind of books are really difficult to experience well before you've had a little more life experience, Gatsby is one of them.
The Old Man and the Sea especially falls into this category.
the good news is that the book is very short and an easy weekend read and also recently in the public domain. which may be prompting a bunch of online content about it.
I know this is kinda tone deaf to ask in a section about books, but: how was the Leonardo DiCaprio modern adaption? I read the book and was well out of college when it premiered, but I never had much interest in seeing it at the time. Does it do the book justice, or at least the much much older adaptation?
If you repeat this same message to anyone from USA, you will be instantly diagnozed with ADHD with a year's supply of medication.
I deeply regret not getting diagnosed as a kid
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
I liked Gatsby in school, but I really didn't get it until living outside of America for awhile. To me it's the perfect encapsulation of the American experience: striving to escape the past while inevitably being pulled down by it.
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.
It sounds like a universal experience in high school is students not reading assigned literature.
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.
The purpose of school is to prepare students to pass whatever selection filter top colleges and universities employ. Schools dropping literature means higher education institutions aren't admitting students on the basis of literature knowledge. No point in wasting time studying something if it's not going to help students pass tests.
That could be offset if we moved away from standardized tests. I think I would prefer verbal exams and vibe checks.
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.
I love this book.
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.
It's kind of interesting how some books, compared to others, become classics
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
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