For some students this approach works. But for people like me it turns what is supposed to be a personalized reflection into a sterile dissection.

I don't blame anyone that resorts to using Cliff's Notes just to get past the assignments. There is only so much that can be said about a certain book, and you can't just write an essay saying "The Great Gatsby was alright but I really didn't get much out of it and I don't see why people think it is so amazing". No, you must profess how elegantly written it is and how you now realize that the American Dream is largely a facade and that greed is what undermines our ideals.

I am not knocking anyone who actually enjoyed The Great Gatsby nor am I actually dismissing what the F. Scott Fitzgerald was trying to convey. What I am saying, though, is that the heavy-handed approach the English curriculum took in trying to make me enjoy this book had the opposite effect. In fact, I remember virtually nothing about it, despite having read it cover-to-cover and having written a series of essays on it.

I would recommend a re-read later in life for anyone who didn't like it the first go around. It's less than 200 pages, so not much of a time comittment. Teacher's do assign you a lot of crap in HS, so it can be hard to tell what is worth your time.

In my high school English we used a 2-volume “anthology” of American lit that had entire books and short stories but was mostly very long excerpts of maybe a couple hundred novels/stories/poems, and we took a comparative approach. Most of us had already read all the top 25 classics (gatsby, Harper Lee, Salinger, grapes of wrath etc) by the time we got to that class though

We weren't forced to write a series of essays explaining how much we loved the book or how brilliantly written it was; that would have earned a D at best in any of the college-bound English classes in my district (and generally, in most other California school districts as well). We did have to write essays engaging with the themes and substantive content of the book (i.e., what ideas the book was conveying and how it did that, or tried to do that).

The point of Gatsby was too see how (relatively) modern books engaged in the same sort of symbolism and symbolic discourse as "classical" works like Dickens. AP English classes were permitted to use more modern novels, and most did (the most recent novel we read as part of the course was the Shipping News.)

Gatsby was one of the books we had to read and I didn't like any of the characters and couldn't care less about anything they wanted or did.

When I was around 30 I decided to read the book again to see if it landed differently and nope. Still thought it was awful.

I did enjoy a few of the assigned books. Canticle for Leibowitz, Brave New World, Lost Horizon, Frankenstein, and Day of the Triffids are a few I remember positively.

Teachers know kids will use AI to write essays and I bet more than a few teachers use them to grade, so there's probably no point in assigning a single book for everybody anymore. IMHO, the best chance to get a kid to read and write about a novel is to let them pick something of interest.

Emerson tells you not to care about what other people think. Fitzgerald gives you an extended opportunity to experience not caring about what other people (particularly "high status" people) think.

My hate for Gatsby was more about the paper thin plot, the shallow characters, and the purple prose. Why should I spend any time thinking about what these characters do or say when, as far as I can tell, they basically have no internal life. They are simple, one dimensional beings who just do things with about as much spirit as a typical video game NPC.

Most of the books I was assigned in high school I actually enjoyed or at least didn't hate.

That's because most kids are too dumb at that point to understand that reading has multiple purposes, and being entertained and liking the characters isn't what they are trying to teach you in higher level English classes. Teachers often make that point clearly, but students are often half asleep or just in disbelief that reading might have other purposes than to instruct or entertain.

Prescribing dull books and hoping that by some miracle whatever it is you are trying to teach with them is getting through is educator malpractice IMHO.

What kind of parent lets their kids use an llm to write an essay? It defeats the entire exercise and growth potential for the student.

I don’t care how profound the meaning, no one needs 30 pages of how to cast the perfect fly fishing cast.

I suppose not finding a subject worthwhile is partly my fault, but some responsibility falls on the curriculum as well.

If you instead memorize and regurgitate what is in the Cliffs Notes, that seems like a fast track to becoming the kind of person who is always told to read the manual because you clearly didn't. While they surely don't do a great job at it, American high schools as far as I can tell are mostly just trying to create adults that don't become brain vampires expecting their better educated peers to be free question answering services because they never learned how to learn.

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.

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?

To expand the window of relatability, another word for this is imagination.

It's like hearing NPR on the radio because your parents turned it on when you're 6... You just don't care.

The vast majority of the content is just utterly unrelatable. It could be great content. But it doesn't matter, you won't suddenly start caring about GDP or employment metrics or politics. Those things are TOO far outside the window of relatability for that age.

Gatsby is the same exact problem - it's busy talking about middle-age malaise, which tend to resonate with teachers, but is just entirely unrelatable to a bunch of kids in their teens.

Those kids are busy day dreaming about the future - they don't have the kind of experiences that let the book resonate yet, and they likely won't for another 20 years at least.

---

You can't expand someone's mind if you don't have anything relevant to present. You just bounce off.

You expand it by having at least SOME content the reader can understand and relate to, anchoring them there, and then shoving the boundary around it wider.

Resonate does not mean mirror, it’s more like sympathy from a personal connection.

You need “resonances between the work and each reader’s individual experience” in order to place yourself in the world of “Zhuang Zhou dreaming he is a butterfly.”

The opposing school of pedagogy would ignore the personal connection and have you focus on style, structure, metaphor. etc.

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.

It's a whole show of people dying on the streets by 20.

[1]https://youtu.be/8DOy4hCih7w

That's one of the things about reading though, it lets you experience life experiences you might have been exposed to on your own. You still have to met things halfway by using your brain a bit, which a lot of students really push back against for some reason. I suspect part of it is that it's the first time they are really asked to read something critically and not just for straight forward instruction or for enjoyment.

I think schools are trying to teach critical reading skills earlier now, but it's hard because if it's not interesting kids won't read it and if it's interesting they might not learn the critical skills necessary to evaluate it under any other lens than it being interesting or enjoyable.

I don't even care if people agree what the book says, I just needed something to look for, because most of them were completely ignorable or outright infuriating.

At least today's kids can have an AI or YouTube video explain what the teacher wants to hear so they can move on to doing something interesting.

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."

The crowd is only a way to impress her, old sports.

"Main character discovers that meaning in life can't come from external social success" is a great basis for a philosophy but makes a poor plot for a novel.

Yes, it seems easier to relate to them after encountering more “careless people” as an adult.

I can't recall anything referencing the Great Gatsby, but maybe they went over my head because I can't recall anything about that except that the Gatsby was apparently Great.

That's true for most of the works in the canon of works that are commonly taught in schools, people that didn't pay attention tend to miss them or be confused by them though. Every time we remove some work by Dickens or Shakespeare from our canon, we lose a bit of that shared culture.

The recent book about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook was titled "Careless People", from a Great Gatsby quote.

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.

With Sinners doing so well in cinemas this month, it's an interesting time to question if there is a racial component to The Great Gatsby that hasn't been so obvious even after decades of (somewhat) close reads by at least High Schoolers.

One longer read on the subject: https://www.contrabandcamp.com/p/gatsbys-secret

It also got me thinking about the possible reasons why F. Scott Fitzgerald dedicated The Great Gatsby to his wife and the Deep South rumors that she wasn't white but only white-passing.

You don't have to dig that far into it for the reference, Gatsby's business associate is a mobster who Gatsby says "fixed the World Series back in 1919". Even if you don't know exactly what kind of crime he is up to it is kind of obvious that he is in a criminal enterprise based on who he works with.

Yeah, looking back there's a lot of history sprinkled in that I didn't appreciate when I was 16 and reading this for a teacher I really didn't like to begin with.

47,0000 words at ~250 words/min is 188 minutes, or just over 3 hours.

I think because it took us weeks to read in high school, that I have this sense that its a huge dense book.

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.

It used to be like that, but it seems like teachers now hardly assign any homework at all.

You will be cursed with years of calling every pharmacy in town once a month to figure out which one has your medication in stock this time, and once you figure that out, you stay on the phone with them until you walk into the store to pick it up so they don't give it to someone else.

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 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 - this 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.

That's funny, what I am hearing from high school students is that overwhelmingly the curriculum has been replaced by contemporary books. Few seniors I talk to have read anything in school written before 1900. Maybe they read one or Shakespeare in the modern English version. There seems to be a lot of assigned books written in recent years, often some sort of depressing coming of age story.

I think English class should be a mix of core classics, plus books that students can pick out to read on their own and then do a report on. For the independent reading, students could pick out Harry Potter or a compelling young adult fiction.

But English at its best should also be connecting us to a common culture that we share with our parents and our ancestors, who are the people that built everything around us. These are books that we might not pick out to read on our own, but society as a whole is better off if everyone reads them and they are part of our common culture. However, I think Gatsby and a lot of high school books actually fail this test. I do like Shakespeare

> Game Of Thrones

I think this is a bad choice for a number of reasons. First, I'd worry it would be corrosive to the morals of my teenagers. Second, it tries to be "gritty realistic" in its medieval setting but actually a lot of that setting and psychology of the characters is not at all realistic. Third, I wouldn't trust any high school teacher to be able to highlight these things and build effective lessons from it.

This, we already lose a lot by not being familiar with the canon that well educated students were learning in the past, we shouldn't shrug off the more recent canon that we share with our parents and grandparents. It's the same reason a lot of irreligious people still take time to learn some of the basic stories from the bible, there is so much christian influence in our society that you miss out if you aren't at least a little familiar with the mythology that things are based on or referencing.

I think that while this isn't anywhere near the whole problem, the selection of books is very slanted in certain directions and that is a part of the problem. I'd call it "politics" but people would think I mean left/right, but that's not really what I'm referring to here... there are definitely some tendencies in the books chosen by literature teachers, by the type of people who would become literature teachers, and while there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, they can end up badly overrepresented.

You've got the broody coming of age stories (which is basically synonymous with "discovering how awful the world is"), the stories about how awful everything is and particularly how awful mankind is, the poems about how depressing everything is, the stories about how nihilistic the author is, the stories that make minimal sense on their own because they are just carrying "literary" symbolism as they make a depressing literary point, etc.

A bit more diversity in some of the literature lists wouldn't go amiss... and again, I'm not really talking about "left/right" or the modern sense of the term, but just, casting a wider net in the general sense. It is not actually illegal or unethical for students to maybe occasionally enjoy a book in school. It is not invalid to maybe study a comedy, an actually funny comedy, in the pursuit of learning about humor, for instance.

One thing that's popular in the schools in my area now could be called "death studies": taking a semester to read and write things about death, even visiting cemeteries and other death-related activities. While I'm sure some of it is very interesting and engages some kids who were bored by the usual material, it seems like it could be dangerous for some teens to spend a lot of time thinking about death for a few months. But the parents who've mentioned it all think it's "cool" and have no concerns about that.

I think Game of Thrones is actually a great example of why we shouldn't be teaching Game of Thrones... I made a historical reference to Savonarola the other day, and when the person didn't know what I was talking about, I said "You know when the religious zealots in GoT take over the city..." GoT is really at it's best if you have an understanding of English history (War of the Roses, etc) such that you can pick up on where all of the references come from - I have no idea if Martin intended Savonarola as his muse, but my point is that historical references and books of the past are the foundation blocks of modern literature and cultural references, so I'd much rather see them taught, as the kids can pick up on modern lit on their own.

So I read Harry Potter (as an adult). The first book, it was ok. Then it went down hill. Harry Potter was or simply became a marketed franchise: Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, ….

What's even to teach in Harry Potter? Yes, reading it en masse is a YA shared experience but that's it. I've never heard a Harry Potter quote. OTOH, I noticed that Careless People alluded to and quoted Gatsby.

Relatable is overrated. Books should be challenging but not too challenging. I remember reading Animal Farm at the perfect age but 1984 a year too soon. I tried reading Catch-22 in 7th grade but didn't get anything. Later, I read it 24 hours straight my first week in college, cackling the whole way through.

I remember the assigned 'relatable' books if slightly. You will relate to this. That is the assignment. I remember them as characters being kind of my age, maybe even in my school. This is the reason I didn't like Catcher In The Rye. OTOH, Winston Smith was definitely not my age, definitely not in my school and unquestionably not me.

Relatable books strike me as engineered epistemic closure. I want to know what the author thinks, not what the author thinks I think.

Picking "old books" at least means you pick for some level of quality (usually) because they've lasted that long in print.

You also don't need to get kids to read Harry Potter; they're already reading that on their own.

Gatsby is a timeless story of class division. The upstart nouveau riche verses the entrenched institutionalists. You could write a version of it set in practically any time or culture.

LLMs, unfortunately, can write you a "book report" on almost anything.

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.

I used to read novels well into adulthood, but family life eventually stopped that. I've tried audiobooks, but I tend to fall asleep or zone out, and haven't completed a novel in at least 10 years.

There has been a huge decline in American reading since this focus started.

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.

The best education is mastery education provided via long term one-on-one mentoring. Essentially the opposite of the current model. Only the rich can afford such services.

Fortunately, AI solves this. Unfortunately, it also makes humans obsolete entirely.

For the up and coming, if you're looking for such services, schools that advertise the Waldorf method is one such service.

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.

>And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

>Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—-

>So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The following year we could have probably moved onto Shakespeare and discussed which plays were inspired by which Ancient Greek myths. Rather than checking off boxes to say we read all the great books, we could have developed a more natural ability to analyze works and understand influences. Pulls, I believe certain books such as the Great Gatsby are probably better appreciated in college when the reader is a bit older.

Later on, and after some therapy, it turns out that I was just going through a lot of abuse at the time and just kinda hid all my feelings. Still do, really. That the characters felt anything was, to old me, just a sign that they weren't working hard enough. 'Like, come on, everyone knows life sucks, right? Just get over Daisy you idiot'. Yeah, no, that's not how people work, it wasn't how I was supposed to work.

I guess that's why it's a classic. You reread it later and see all these tings in you that changed too, but the words just stay the same.

I still maintain that 'Cather in the Rye' is just a rich kid complaining about nothing though. I hated that book and Holden too, seems just overly spoiled to me.

> I still maintain that 'Cather in the Rye' is just a rich kid complaining about nothing though

Teenage me loved it. I'm curious what dad me thinks now.

Thanks for the hat-tip!

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.

But I remember when my niece told us they had them reading Nietzsche. Her main takeaway seemed to be that they were Very Smart because they were reading Nietzsche. She didn't have a clue what she was reading, so if any of it stuck with her, it was probably as likely to be misunderstood as understood.

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.

The thing is, most of these books people are complaining about aren't actually 'hard books', especially when read at a chapter or two per week with a teacher guiding you through all the major themes. The goal isn't to teach kids that reading is fun, it's to teach them critical reading skills.

There is something to be said about reaching the students where they are, but we already dumb down things too much to allow the slower students to keep pace. They can learn about reading for fun in remedial reading classes.

Engaging students' attention, even if they aren't ready to fully grasp it, is great exposure.

Forcing them to scan their retinas over black-and-white patterns for hours, not so much.

For me, Gatsby was... not entirely terrible. It was mostly a waste of my time, but looking back I can see some of the themes were at least somewhat worthwhile.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was an absolute waste of my time. If Joyce is worth an adult reading (which I doubt to this day), then don't make high school kids read him.

Possibly, good books hit different at different ages and can be appreciated at each of those ages for different reasons.

I have shelves full of books I had read before finishing school, and 90% of what we read in English lessons (I am German) was ok, and yet I hated 90% of what we read (or supposed to read) in our German lessons. Maybe it was the selection, maybe it was implicit bias (I also liked English lessons and my teachers, and didn't like either for German). Just some from memory (annotated Shakespeare was ok, I liked Poe, I liked Huxley)

So no, except for a few you would not manage to convince me to give them a second chance.

And also no for your last point, some Dan Brown novels were ok and I didn't enjoy the rest in the first place ;)

I'm Polish, longest text we've ever read at English class was one page.

At university, by the way.

It's RUINED for me. I could never go back and read it. There's far too much else I'd rather have cross my eyeballs so many other stories in the library. By having a work unworthy of my experience and tastes wasted on me at a young age my emotional investment in it is already squandered.

Have a big list of OK books. Have some representative excerpts from them, and let the kids pick books they're going to enjoy. The point surely is NOT to haze / torment the kids with 'bad' books that discourage reading generally.

Another that baffles me is The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

People can read it if they want, but if they find it dull four chapters in, just walk away, sometimes "the greats" are just culturally significant, or not your style, or whatever.

There are lots of good books out there though, and I'm glad you discovered something above the airport bestsellers. May I suggest to absolutely anyone

Hunger, by Knut Hamson

Ask The Dust, by John Fante

American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis

Lullaby, by Chuck Palahniuk

Porno, by Irvine Welsh

We read selections from The Canterbury Tales, in translation, as high school freshman. Our genius history teacher made us promise not to tell our parents, and let us read one of the dirty ones. I was sold.

Later, I learned Middle English, and read the entire Tales. He's brilliant. Reliably funny and engaging (except for one chapter, obviously written in spite after being swindled IRL!).

> 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.

Thankfully not true for me

If you're reading for just funsies, sure. But none of their works are particularly long, even reading a few chapters here and there, it'd take a week for each at most.

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/478.Required_Reading_in_...

However, I wouldn't be so optimistic about your experience being universal. As an experiment, I just started re-reading The Great Gatsby. While it's much better than I remember, it still felt like a slog and failed to hook me in a way that such prized "you have to be familiar with this" literature should be. And I still think they could have done a better job communicating what's so good about it.

Relatedly, I only recently learned that some (most?) people actually like iambic pentameter, that it adds to the joy of hearing the lines read. This is a revelation, since it ... doesn't do anything for me. But that fact feels like it's important subtext that could have been communicated, and I could have been pushed in that direction -- that seems like the obvious move. And yet it just wasn't. Sure, they taught that Shakespeare used it, but only as a dry "oh hey this is one thing to note about his works" not in a "oh and this is a big part of its appeal".

There are a lot of missed opportunities for teaching appreciation of literature.

(I'm not sure if I didn't enjoy the grade-school stuff because of what I now recognize as its jingoism (it's so much more interesting to read the history of people making choices for human reasons, sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes just wrong, than of godlike heroes helming countries foredestined for greatness!), or just because I wasn't ready for it.)

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.

1. The assignment isn't simply to understand the "Great Gatsby" it's to be able to read, synthesize your thoughts into a formal coherent argument or perspective on the book. If you cliff notes or AI, you are missing the point.

2. [OPINION] The fact that we are still teaching the same book is a bit of an issue. There are many well written books you can do this with.

3. [OPINION] at the same time, having everyone read the same book across the nation over time does help create the base for some sort of collective cultural and intellectual identity.