It’s the story of an outsider who gives up everything in order to join the “in crowd”, and at the end finds that it was all meaningless. I think this is impactful because it forces the reader (or at least, forced me) to deeply consider what _I_ wanted out of life, instead of what others want, or what seems conventional.
The crowd is only a way to impress her, old sports.
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 also read it in high school and I recall spending about half the book muttering "oh my God, Gatsby, there are so many other women in the world get over yourself."
It's a whole show of people dying on the streets by 20.
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.
And also about the indifference that generational wealth has towards amusing interlopers that provide fleeting excitement to their women
I love it and want these privileges
Yes, it seems easier to relate to them after encountering more “careless people” as an adult.
I 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.
The recent book about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook was titled "Careless People", from a Great Gatsby quote.
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.
"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.
It used to be like that, but it seems like teachers now hardly assign any homework at all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.