How “The Great Gatsby” took over high school | Hacker News Reader

How “The Great Gatsby” took over high school

newyorker.com

78 pointspseudolus184 comments

My take on the average American high school English curriculum is this: Your teacher approaches the class and says, "I love this book, it is one of the greatest works of literature ever produced and you are going to love it as well. Pour over it with a fine toothed comb and write a series of essays explaining just how much you love this book and how brilliantly written it is. Don't forget to profess just how much you have internalized the morals it is trying to convey."

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.

Would be way cooler to assign 2-3 different books and request a critical analysis of competing themes. Or pick you own book, get it approved by the teacher, and analyze that. But some of that is probably too much for younger students

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

I agree, and the most enjoyable semester of English was one where the professor took this approach. The only downside was that the books to select from were limited and there were no non-fiction options to choose from. However my teacher did appreciate the effort I made in trying to persuade him to allow me to read Meditations instead.

The book How to Read a Book goes into how to read and evaluate multiple works this way. I'd recommend it to any high schooler, by the way. It also talks more generally about how to read and take notes effectively.

Picking a book getting approached by the teacher then writing a book report has been how I was taught to read since 1st grade. After moving to the US for high school, being forced to read through the American classics was what killed any urges I had for reading fiction outside of school work

Sometimes I think high school English courses are designed to make kids hate reading.

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.

I read it close to 20 years ago now, but my recollection was that all of the characters being unlikable and everything they wanted and did (basically, worrying about status) being uncompelling was kind of the point.

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.

OK, but it's hard to read fiction where you don't care about any of the characters.

Depends on why you read fiction. If you read it mostly for narrative, sure. If you read it mostly to explore ideas and to enjoy the artistry, probably not.

It's not that the characters were unlikable. Unlikable characters can be great.

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.

>Sometimes I think high school English courses are designed to make kids hate reading.

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.

You have to meet the kids where they are.

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.

This mindset is why literacy rate is so low in America. I enjoyed reading so much when I grew up abroad and got to pick the books i have to read and write a book report about. Though it has to be approved. After moving back to the US, being forced to read many of these boring classics just taught me to avoid reading in my free time

> Teachers know kids will use AI to write essays...

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.

Busy parents or parents with kids who don't want to talk about what they are doing at school.

> so there's probably no point in assigning a single book for everybody anymore

You could if you have an exam.

"Love" is very loosely used here. The actual assignment is about meaning, plot, structure etc. You don't have to love anything to get value dissecting it.

This, parent comment is telling on themselves, they didn't understand what the class was teaching because they chose to be obstinate instead of curious.

Perhaps, but I think it would be incorrect to say that I didn't understand what the class was trying to teach me. I may be an obstinate person, but I wouldn't attribute a lack of zeal for a particular subject as an overall lack of curiosity.

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

My take on the average American high school English curriculum is I have no idea what the average is because I only experienced one run through two high schools and you didn't experience much more than that, either. My experience did not match yours at all. I cannot recall any instance ever where a teacher expected me to love what we were reading. They expected we could suss out some sort of thematic relevance and defend our theses with examples found in the text and that's about it. We weren't training to be professional critics that evaluate quality and make recommendations about what others may or may not enjoy consuming. It was more demonstrate you know how to pay attention and extract some level of meaning from a text.

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.

Yeah, I was gonna say that I think that most of the assigned books are chosen by the state, right? Obviously it varies a lot, but I can't recall any teacher actually wanting to teach a book, let alone having the freedom to choose just about anything.

I re-read Gatsby about 30 years after high-school and came away thinking that it was one of the most well written books I'd ever read. FSF's command of the English language is truely amazing in the book. When originally forced to read it in high school, I'm sure I hated it, like I hated everything.

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.

I've tried reading it maybe ten times. The funny thing is that I really enjoy it, I just inevitably put it down and forget about it. I have a hard time finishing books, though I don't have the same issue with audiobooks.

For an ESL reader who'd gone through hundreds of 'best-seller modern English-speaking' novels and a high technical English fluency, fresh out of To Kill a Mockingbird (which was a shock, I had such a hard time at first) then Salinger and Hemingway, Gatsby was such a wonderful experience - I really didn't care for any character, plot, content... but the way FSF wrote was so compact and different. I can still remember the joy I felt, surprised that 'you can do that in English?'.

Personally loved to read until I had to do this to a river runs through it, which may be one of the most boring books I’ve ever encountered. Put me off course books for years.

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

The problem is that a lot of the themes and topics in the novel simply aren't relevant to teenagers, and won't be for years. It's why English teachers love the novel and students almost universally hate it. My English teacher also said as much at the time: most of us wouldn't appreciate this novel until well after college.

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.)

My take on it is that a halfway decent teacher will simply want you to notice those themes, not necessarily endorse them. For example, "this book explores the ideas that the American Dream is largely a facade and that greed is what undermines our ideals. In this essay, I will explain why I disagree with these ideas..."

Absolutely disagree. Well articulated analysis of books are generally accepted in high schools and colleges whether they are positive or critical. What you’re probably referring to is dismissive essays that brusquely say that the content doesn’t apply to them without providing a well researched reason. Those usually come from edgy layabouts that spent 10 minutes on the assignment.

Candide and White Noise I accidentally read prior to the class, not knowing they were curriculum books. Both I found absolutely hilarious.

Both failed to elicit even a minor chuckle once it entered the classroom. Not from the students, not the teacher, and somehow not even myself.

I don’t know what how classrooms are so categorically destructive to the book they purport to teach

I read Gatsby in high school over 40 years ago and don’t recall the assignments around it being quite so heavy-handed. It’s a novel that certainly invites thematic analysis and truly there’s only so much you can say about that; but the paper I ended up writing dealt with the symbolism and craft of the text and how that supported the theme. It’s odd because practically every other HS English assignment felt obligatory and unmemorable, but that one apparently did not.

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?

> 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.

I don't think this works.

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.

I think maybe it isn’t all or nothing here. Reading about something outside of one’s familiarity can really expand what is relatable to a student, with the help of an instructor to fill in context and use things to which the student can relate to help them grasp the ideas in the text.

You’ve misunderstood the pedagogy of Rosenblatt. It is essentially what you describe.

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.

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.

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.

Ah! This makes more sense!

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?

>may not have the life experiences to understand

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.

Same goes for “they never taught us how to pay taxes!” Often, the kids were directly taught just that, but the time gap between when they learned and when it was needed means they forgot, even if they at least pretended to pay attention.

I think this is it, though for certain works, we spent a lot of time in class discussing and acting out and this sort of engagement greatly increased my appreciation and comprehension of those works, thanks to my English teachers.

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."

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

So many of the "high school" books would be much, much better read if the message was emblazoned on the cover.

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.

Curricula assign these books to students so they can learn to interpret their meanings without needing it explicitly stated. Of course, the teacher will offer an interpretation after the students have tried their hand at it, but the whole point of the exercise would be defeated by printing the interpretation at the outset. We should not be further offloading critical thinking in service of entertainment value.

The kids already aren’t learning. Putting the intended message on the cover wouldn’t make things worse.

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 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).

Yeah, I totally missed that. I really want to re-read it now. Thanks for the short synopsis!

Your comment has prompted me to add it to my reading list to reread, so there's that. :)

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.

I remember not liking the characters and wondering why should I read this, but now I have come to appreciate the value of understanding the view points of other people in spite of how I might feel about their actions and words or be distanced from their existence by virtue in this case of the wealth and privilege available to them.

Homer and Shakespear at least have the advantage of being referred to all the time elsewhere. If you don't at least know the basics of Romeo and Juliet you're going to be confused many times (there's something called Romeo and Juliet laws, for goodness sake).

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.

OK, that's your experience. On the other hand, https://eu.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2013/05/07/why-the-... offers some pointers as to why a fair number of people have a more positive reaction. Although it is, in a way, an obvious statement, the very last line somehow always stuck with me reading it years ago "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

> I can't recall anything referencing the Great Gatsby

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

>Homer and Shakespear at least have the advantage of being referred to all the time elsewhere.

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.

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?

You can only read so much before your time or stamina is exhausted.

What free time? If teachers ever heard of a kid having any they'd make sure to assign more homework.

>What free time? If teachers ever heard of a kid having any they'd make sure to assign more homework.

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

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.

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

You won't be given a year's supply of medication.

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.

Plus now a lot of doctors are requiring drug tests to make sure you're taking it, but not too much, and not taking other drugs, including legal ones.

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.

That's one I actually liked reading, at least on the surface. Maybe I didn't get deep meaning out of it but I don't recall that one being a struggle to just get through.

Absolutely you don't need much emotional depth to enjoy a story about a man struggling against the ocean and a fish. You miss things, but it's still enjoyable.

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 personally enjoyed both and felt they added color in their own way. the point of the story is that it touches on deep feelings ; i personally felt dicaprio did a really good job of exuding the dodgy side of gatsby superimposed on the vulnerable human within but then that’s probably mostly in the eye of the beholder.

judging from my teenage daughter’s reactions to film in general, i’d guess a younger audience would prefer the newer film because it would feel to be of higher production value with better fit and finish.

The recent burst of Gatsby content is almost surely due to its publication date (April 10, 1925).

I wonder whether it also has something to do with the use of its phrase "careless people" as the title of a currently-famous book about how awful Meta's senior management is.

You know, I was going to argue with you that it's much more than a weekend read, but no, you're right.

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.

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.

>reference to Gatsby making his money in drug stores- that meant he was a bootlegger.

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.

I read a fascinating discussion the other week that Tom's racism may not be incidental to the plot, but one of the keys to unlocking some other deeper/semi-hidden insights into it. The innocuous sounding question at the top of that rabbit hole was "Is Gatsby white?" It's a fascinating question and there's lots of evidence that Gatsby is at least white-passing (seemingly no problem in the segregated at the time Seelbach Hotel, for instance), but that doesn't necessarily mean white, especially to the sort of old-money racist that Tom is portrayed to be.

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.

Oops, you are indeed right. I was mixing in Tom and Nick in my memories. Needed to use 3 dudes to properly sell my horrible cliff notes.

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.

I remember I loved the use of language, but hated the entirely uninteresting plot & characters.

"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.

Similar to me, although I know I read the entire thing. The only thing I remember from the entire novel was in the ending. There was a "Swastika Holding Company" run by a guy who was vaguely Jewish, which was not an odd combination in 1925 but was absurd enough to be funny to me a century later.

It's really the difference between reading something because you want to and reading because you're forced to. If I had picked the book out myself, I probably would remember more about it.

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 - 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.

Read your first sentence as: "I have a racial insight on this topic", and it still mostly worked.

Something nice from a cyberpunk series would work well.

Snow Crash comes to mind as an, offhand, likely safe enough for teens book that isn't boring.

Maybe if you censored out the underage sex?

I reread that book recently and that immediately raised a red flag where the author makes it seems like the girl consents as in "well, I guess this is happening" then proceeds to portray her as a enjoying it and not really getting into the details of how a person/body may react regardless of a woman's (in this case) consent. This is much better portrayed in My Brilliant Friend with all the complexity of emotion of the victim towards the act and their reaction. I really wish if one thing could be changed about that book is just simply making the 15 year old character an adult.

I do remember an attempted rape, but I didn't remember the underage part. Probably I was more focused on overpowering an attacker as a positive aspect. It was _many_ years ago that I read that book.

Yes, you should teach the book that has a sex scene between a 15 year old girl and a 30 year old man to high school students.

There's an almost religious fight against "popular" books - they won't even consider thinking about reading the Lord of The Rings - let alone modern popular novels.

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.

Who in 2025 is actually against putting Lord of the Rings in the curriculum because it is too "popular" or not old enough? It's the same age as a lot of other classic high school texts (1984, Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, etc.) And I think it's quality is actually even more appreciated now than when it became popular. It seems like it is just inertia keeping it out, plus most of the people who want to reform the curriculum want newer books than Lord of the Rings.

Also you might want school texts to be relatively short. LOTR is not.

That is true! From what I have seen and heard from the schools around me, every year the assigned texts are getting shorter and with a lower reading level.

Back when I read Dickens or Gatsby I hadn't read enough history to really understand what was going on because I'd was missing a lot of context that changed the meaning of events in the book. Gatsby could serve as launching point for learning about the history of the automobile, prohibition, traffic safety, attitudes towards Jews, New York development and geography, and a lot of other things.

In college, I took a history class called Shakespeare's Kings where we read through most of the Henriad. It presented post-hoc, editorialized versions of history (the plays) against how we currently see it. It's too bad literature isn't generally approached this holistically.

I remember teachers in my school having a poor opinion, dissuading us from reading contemporary books. I'm still not convinced on their rationale.

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.

"often some sort of depressing coming of age story."

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.

> Game Of Thrones

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.

>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.

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.

Yes, everyone I've talked to about this has said it's all contemporary literature now. One mother was telling me her son is bored in literature class because the books all have female protagonists now. Much like in modern movies, it seems some schools/teachers are trying to make up for there being too many boy-centric stories in the past by making it all girl-centric today. Unfortunate that they aren't trying to find a balance.

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.

We teach old books because no one would ever agree on what new books to teach.

This is what teachers told me when my sons were in high school 2004-2010. Any mention of drug use, sex or race would result in complaints from a few parents.

>I don't want to read a Dickens book or Gatsby, I want to read a book that is relatable

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.

There are plenty of very good reasons I can think of to standardize a curriculum as much as possible, not the least of which is the demand you're placing on 25 year-olds being paid $40k a year. They can't teach what they don't know themselves and they can't reasonably be expected to read in a level of detail necessary to teach every book every individual student might enjoy and prefer being taught. They can, on the other hand, become experts on an accepted canon that stays largely the same year to year. You're otherwise recreating the JavaScript framework treadmill that everyone here hates so much but for people earning 1/10th the salary.

Back in my HS days, there was a lot of individual choice of books allowed. Effort was tested by writing of "book reports". I read much of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky that way.

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

> why not teach Game Of Thrones or Harry Potter?

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.

There's plenty of material in Harry Potter to serve as a useful book for the basics of literary analysis. The quotability isn't really relevant to that. There's bravery, slavery, love, loss, fascism, resistance, classism, racism, journalistic integrity, crime and punishment, the hero's journey, and more.

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.

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.

We'll never escape standardized testing. We have mass education involving hundreds of students per class as a matter of public policy. Tests are the only efficient way to assess students. Failing grades and general lack of performance can actually turn into political problems.

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.

> Only the rich can afford such services.

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

> The best education is mastery education provided via long term one-on-one mentoring.

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

https://pca.st/episode/48e89a05-2812-4f81-99dd-ff18f7819df0

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

That’s more due to idiotic changes at the elementary level than HS curriculum.

I don't know how pretending to read literature in later grades helped with reading, especially when the reading scores referenced in that article are assessed years before students hit that point.

I was the dork who read every book assigned to me in English class, and proud of it. Of course, this stopped once I got to college. My CS course load meant that however much I enjoyed my humanities classes, the readings were the first thing that fell by the wayside. Still bums me out.

I read every book that was assigned to us, until grade 12, when we got something called "July's People" by Nadine Gordimer. Nobel Prize winner or not, she used literary techniques that were well beyond us, and we lacked teaching support.

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.

I also had a kid and it slowed down my reading. When I do read, it's usually non-fiction. It's too bad.

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.

Your experience makes me wonder if it hit the same way for some of the US WW2 soldiers mentioned in the article who got a copy sent to them...

The mistake with high school literature in my opinion is that it tries to cover too many works. My freshman year, we read Shakespeare, the Odyssey, Catcher in the Rye, and more. We should have started with Greek mythology and learned who the gods were. Then learned about the hero’s from the various myths. Then moved onto the Iliad, and finally the Odyssey. Instead, I had to read the Odyssey and write a paper on it without proper context. The people who listened to the Odyssey in Ancient Greece were very familiar with the myths and Greek gods. My teacher did a good job laying the groundwork, but I still think something was lost by not going through the previous works. Ancient Greek literature and oral tradition deserves a much more complete course.

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.

>Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

>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.

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.

Fair point, but I also think initial exposure to things you don’t yet understand is a useful step towards understanding them.

Not so sure.

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.

They have to be able to reach high enough to get some of it. It has to repay their time in high school. It should also show them there's more to reach for, but they need to be able to get some of it.

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.

>> 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.

>My opinion is that reading hard books at school simply turns people off reading completely.

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.

Indeed. It's a giant, unrecognized problem with pedagogy. Things are taught from the position of already understanding them and the messy confusing process of actually grokking anything is mostly ignored and students are left to figure it out alone.

So that when you go back to them, you can look at your memories when you were younger.

How else are you supposed to know that you've grown since highschool if you can't reread Catcher in the Rye in a different light?

It's probably good if the book requires you to stretch a bit, and even if you don't totally get it yet. My parents never put any limits on what I could read, so I stumbled over the Poe shelf at the library at a fairly young age. There was plenty I didn't understand, but plenty that I could, and some stories still stick with me.

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.

>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?

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

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

Idk, Dickens and Melville are pretty hard to get through.

Try Joyce as a non-native speaker :P

My god.

In the YouTube comments for the song "Informer" by Snow ("Informer, <lots of words>, a licky boom-boom now"), someone refers to it as "the final boss of learning English".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSffz_bl6zo

(Edit: can't find that specific comment, link just goes to the music video.)

I’m a native English speaker and I felt like a non-native reader when I tried to read Ulysses.

Moby Dick seems to be very love-it-or-hate-it. Some people can't make it through two pages; some people can't put it down once they start.

>Idk, Dickens and Melville are pretty hard to get through.

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.

Haven’t read Dickens, but Melville was a revelation for me. His short stories are great, but Moby Dick is a work of glory. It’s hard to explain why, but Moby Dick basically bifurcated my life: there was the time before I read it and the time after. That being said, I would have hated it in high school and am glad it wasn’t assigned. It was something I could only appreciate in my 30s.

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.)

I'm not sure I'd recommend all of them but the first 20ish books on this list are an accurate representation of what I was assigned in school.

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

I'm not sure I agree with this. People are different and not everyone has to enjoy so-called literature that is not pure entertainment.

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 ;)

Do you read books in English in your English lessons in Germany?

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

At university, by the way.

Been a while, but yeah, we read shorter stuff in class, and had some books we had to read on our own to discuss and you also had to give at least one short talk on another book you read.

Agreed.

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!).

I loathed Gatsby in high school.

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.

I agree with the suggestion to try it, because I've had similar experiences myself in a different area: history. Even reading the dry Wikipedia articles made the old topics seem much more interesting than I remembered them being in school, and did a better job at communicating the significance.

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.

Couldn't agree more about history. I was a good student who couldn't stand history (called "social studies" in my school), did the minimum to get through it wth good grades, then never took a college history course that wasn't required. Then one day in the library I was looking for a big thick book to pass a chunk of time, and grabbed Shirer's "The rise and fall of the Third Reich." Not only was it fascinating on its own, but it referenced so much of the history that underlay the events of WWII that it sent me off on a hunt to fill in that missing background. And, well, now I'm hooked!

(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.)

I read Gatsby, Conrad and Salinger as an adult. Not impressed. Sorry.

> 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

I read The Great Gatsby outside of formal education, for my own benefit, during my college years, in a non-U.S. country. I thought it was the opposite of "actually really good", I found it to be a resolutely mediocre experience. At no stage did I get any inkling as to why it might be considered "a great book".

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

Women, by Charles Bukowski, I should add

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

It's an excellent book that didn't at all speak to me when I was in high school.

Same experience as you. I don't know if I was too emotionally immature to get it, or it's just lost on people until they get to be a certain age?

The issue I had was that the book just seemed like a lot of wingeing to me back then.

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.

Great comment. I grew up with the "life sucks" and "work harder" mentality. Both of them eat you up inside, and I lost at least a decade to doubling down on them when they didn't work well over time. Sounds like this book will be interesting in more ways than I expected.

> 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.

I've never read catcher, but the standard answer is that Holden is the way he is because he was horrifically traumatised.

Yeah, as someone with that same-ish background then, that's maybe something I have to work more on is sympathizing with my fellow abused.

Thanks for the hat-tip!

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.

The Great Gatsby was an unreadable book when it came out, and even Warner Bros. struggled to make it watchable with over 100 million dollars. I think the only lesson we can learn from it is about American pedagogy.

It's really as simple as the fact that it's a much easier book to read, get through, and relate to than a lot of other books middle school and high school students have to read. It's not Shakespeare, it's not Dickens, it's not Dostoevsky. For a lot of us, it was a breath of fresh air (as was Hemingway's works).

The only thing I remember from reading this in high school English was everyone got a quiz question wrong because no one knew nor was it explained to us what uncut pages on books were.

Responding to some of the comments in the thread.

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.

This is the type of content I want to see from The New Yorker.

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