> 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.
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.
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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.