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 hotsauceman1 wrote:

If it was written today, it would be a wirerack dimestore novel

There isn't enough action or sex in the Great Gatsby to be a dime store novel Maybe if we added a car chase and a really vivid gay orgy.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
I hate the literature to.
The Great Gatsby was OVER the top with its metaphors. The eyes of god being overly used and was just stupid.
If it was written today, it would be a wirerack dimestore novel

The eyes of God are disappointed with you. Feel the eyes of God bore into you from above, shining with disappointment, and feel ashamed.

I never had to read The Great Gatsby, but I did have to read Lord of the Flies.

I've tried reading GG twice, once for school once as an adult.

Both times, I literally fell asleep reading the thing out of pure boredom.

I do believe I'm destined to never finish it.

The Great Gatsby bored me to tears at school... yet for some inexplicable reason I really want to see this movie.

 Monster Rain wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
There is "Understand" and then there is "forcing it down our gullet to think things that are not true"
In HS english you cannot have an Opinion that differs from the teacher, lest you fail

Again, despite your heretical purple bronie avatar, you are correct.

There are aspects of these posts that make me question the quality of a certain poster's education on the subject of English.

I'm actually a pretty big Hawthorne fan, though.

Bring it baby.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
I hate the literature to.
The Great Gatsby was OVER the top with its metaphors. The eyes of god being overly used and was just stupid.
If it was written today, it would be a wirerack dimestore novel

Written today, it might not be published.

Okay, y'all are gonna kill me for this, but I liked the Great Gatsby. Yes, I'm not ashamed to admit it, I liked it. I've even read it 3 times because I liked it so much. I don't care what anyone says, Fitzgerald was amazing at his descriptions of people and places - the first party scene in the book frankly is one of my favorite sequences in a novel. It just pops right out of the page and into your mind. Fitzgerald was great at crafting sentences that carried weight. The closing sentence of The Great Gatsby is one of the best I have ever read, and I've read a lot, everything from Faulkner to Hemingway, Solzhenitsyn., Vonnegut, Hawthorne, Dostoyevsky, Updike, and others, and I still find myself entranced by Fitzgerald's way with words. The character of Gatsby, while not the most original, is one of the most memorable characters I've ever encountered. Fitzgerald manages to build a believable and strong undercurrent of self-doubt and worry into Gatsby's otherwise bluff and easy-going personality that makes him relatable, even to me, a kid from the mid-West that's never had much money.

Also, I think the whole "eye of God" thing is blown waaay out of proportion by teachers. Actually, that's one of the problems of highschool English; it really overemphasizes metaphor/presents them in such a way that a student cannot draw their own conclusions, not matter how much thought goes into that conclusion. It's a big problem. So much of the enjoyment of reading comes from the readers own interpretations of the content of the book that, frankly, it's no wonder that some many students are disgruntled by the "present everything as fact" method of teaching English.

Anyways, I'm just sitting here waiting for the lynch mob.

~Tim?

Personally I've always found teachers who try and read deeper meaning into literature where there really isn't any not very good teachers.

I like literature classes (my favorites were in collage) where its as much a history class as a english class where you get to learn about what was going on in the authors life and the world at large and how some of the influences made it into the book.

Like finding out that this particualr sci-fi and fantasy author whom everyone thought was a bloke was actually a woman who may or may not have been bisexual but who's mother had once come unto her. And then you read a bit more of the book/short stories with a different perspective.

 Frazzled wrote:

 Monster Rain wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
There is "Understand" and then there is "forcing it down our gullet to think things that are not true"
In HS english you cannot have an Opinion that differs from the teacher, lest you fail

Again, despite your heretical purple bronie avatar, you are correct.

There are aspects of these posts that make me question the quality of a certain poster's education on the subject of English.

I'm actually a pretty big Hawthorne fan, though.

Bring it baby. .

Not you, Good sir.

Not you.

Instead of GG... read Lysistrata.

I still say schools still need more sci-fi literature.
1984 for example.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
I still say schools still need more sci-fi literature.
1984 for example.

Or fahrenheit 451 or I robot

I bet some parents would complain about 1984 because of the sex, people are like that sometimes.

My sister had to read 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and A Brave New World through the course of her English classes over the last two years. My High School many moons ago actually offered a semester long scifi course as an English elective.

 rubiksnoob wrote:
Sigh. It's sad how little regard people have for literature, simply because they don't want to take the effort to actually understand it.

It's a stupid book that couldn't be more heavy handed if it tried to beat it's message into your head with a sledgehammer. It's prose is appallingly boring, it's characters flatter than Mr.Game & Watch, it's plot is trite, and it's message could be delivered in a single paragraph rather than a several hundred page snooze fest.

Jules Vern and H.G Welles would be far better authors for high school age kids.

Never read it to be honest, but i'm being forced into watching the film as it's the wife's choice for our next cinema trip. Never should have agreed to take turns in choosing the films.......

It seems that there are a lot of American posters here who had a traumatic time with the GG in high school. This thread has opened up some old wounds. From the bottom of my heart, I apologise

 rubiksnoob wrote:
Sigh. It's sad how little regard people have for literature, simply because they don't want to take the effort to actually understand it.

Oh, I understand it well enough, I just didn't enjoy it.

Now, 1984, there was a book I enjoyed.

I enjoyed it...

Considering the subject matter of GG, it doesn't even sound like the kind of book that would have any meaning to a highschool student. Granted, I haven't read it, so I obviously can't say anything concretely, but from what it sounds like, the entire idea of making it a book for highschool reading is an awful one. It sounds like something that would resonate much more with young adult audiences who actually have to come to terms with the social order of things. Not some student who doesn't have to worry about things like class at all.

A great may be a great, but greats still appeal to demographics. Reading and critical thinking shouldn't be considered a chore, and a lot of the reason for the way that it's considered to be that is because books that are obviously not meant for high school students are forced upon high school students.

Like finding out that this particualr sci-fi and fantasy author whom everyone thought was a bloke was actually a woman who may or may not have been bisexual but who's mother had once come unto her. And then you read a bit more of the book/short stories with a different perspective.

Er...who was that?

I'm still pissed that in HS English they didn't let me read Batman: Year One or Charlotte's Web!

I was always angry we didn't do more poetry in my English classes. It was all about novels (or sections of). There's more literature out there and short stories (imo) are much more suited to a high school level literature/english class than reading the same 4 novels I read last year in the previous level of the course.

Instead of reading a bunch of novels I'd prefer if I'd been taught on a single novel and a collection of short stories and poems. It would have been way funner and simpler to manage as a student.

 Easy E wrote:
I'm still pissed that in HS English they didn't let me read Batman: Year One or Charlotte's Web!

As a positive for English teachers:
1. My 6th grade teacher let me include the manual for Panzer Blitz as books for a competition on number of books read. If you're not familiar this is like permitting the FOW manual as a replacement book.
2. Another teacher took ten minutes talking about a gang fight, then showed us West Side Story and then revealed it was actually Shakespeare. He also showed Ran after we read King Lear.
3. One of my Boy's English teachers officially added Ender's Game to the reading list options after The Boy did a synopsis of it, and most of the boys jumped on that instead of the usual dreck.


With the exception of Great Expectations, and GG (Both had Great interestingly) I enjoyed the books and plays we did. But I was a nut for Shakespeare.

Every year older you get, the better GG gets. If you read it in high school PLEASE read it again. It's one of the best books ever written, but schools consistently make kids read it too young, when it's not really "for" them yet.

We'll just have to agree to disagree on that one.

Still hate catcher in the eye swell

 Rented Tritium wrote:
Every year older you get, the better GG gets. If you read it in high school PLEASE read it again. It's one of the best books ever written, but schools consistently make kids read it too young, when it's not really "for" them yet.

I never read it in school, but many of the books that I did read during my education I bought and re-read later in life because I enjoyed them first time around in school;
To Kill A Mockingbird
Hamlet
MacBeth
King Lear
Snow Falling on Cedars
Of Mice & Men
Canterbury Tales

I can also chime in and say that my own experience of English teachers was overwhelmingly positive. They had no problem with a difference of interpretation, so long as you could provide evidence to substantiate it.

I don't think I actually disliked anything I studied for English Literature...

 Frazzled wrote:

Like finding out that this particualr sci-fi and fantasy author whom everyone thought was a bloke was actually a woman who may or may not have been bisexual but who's mother had once come unto her. And then you read a bit more of the book/short stories with a different perspective.

Er...who was that?

Alice Bradley Sheldon, her pen name was James Tiptree, Jr.

I mmust be old as I don't have a clue who that is. Off to Google!

Dreadclaw69 wrote:

 Rented Tritium wrote:
Every year older you get, the better GG gets. If you read it in high school PLEASE read it again. It's one of the best books ever written, but schools consistently make kids read it too young, when it's not really "for" them yet.

I never read it in school, but many of the books that I did read during my education I bought and re-read later in life because I enjoyed them first time around in school;

Canterbury Tales

I can also chime in and say that my own experience of English teachers was overwhelmingly positive. They had no problem with a difference of interpretation, so long as you could provide evidence to substantiate it.

Whoa, who the Hell reads Canterbury Tales in high school? It's written in Middle English!