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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

To not get The Great Gatsby?

131 replies

MudAndGlitter · 01/12/2011 16:29

I heard brilliant things and the writings nice and all but I just felt a bit let down. Or am I a twat who needs to be more cultured?

OP posts:
amysaidno · 01/12/2011 20:41

I have read it and I can't remember anything about it. Not anything.

marriedandwreathedinholly · 01/12/2011 20:58

My DS did it at school and it nearly turned him off doing A'Level English!

claig · 01/12/2011 21:05

MudandGlitter, you are spot on. It's absolute dross.
Glad there are other posters who also agree. Everyone tells you constantly how good it is.

'I hated it too.
Its not as bad as The Heart of Darkness though. Man I hated that book.'

glastocat, I agree with you entirely about Gatsby and Heart of Darkness too and I agree that 'To Kill a Mockingbird' is a good book.

Didn't like 'Apocalyse Now' either. Another one which everyone says is great.

midnightexpress · 01/12/2011 22:07

Well, if you didn't like Heart of Darkness, you're not likely to like Apocalypse Now, since they are the same story. Wink

TeamDamon · 01/12/2011 22:14

I love The Great Gatsby. It has some of the most beautiful writing I've ever read in it.

Did laugh at the reference to the shirts earlier though Grin

I am biased though because I taught it last year at AS Level to an all-female group and we just wallowed in the 1920s for a term, loving it.

TeamDamon · 01/12/2011 22:15

Heart of Darkness also bloody brilliant. Oddly, I've never got the To Kill A Mockingbird love-in, though - I found it fairly tedious. Blush

claig · 01/12/2011 22:15

Yes, you're right. But it's not even the story that is the problem. The idea is not bad, it's the implementation that is so boring, and teh film is even worse than the book. Brando mumbling away just makes it even worse.

claig · 01/12/2011 22:20

Conrad's Nostromo is quite good. But Conrad's writing is a bit stilted and convoluted, maybe because English wasn't his native language.

jaquelinehyde · 01/12/2011 22:20

I love The Great Gatsby!

racingheart · 01/12/2011 22:39

YABU. It is the most perfectly written novel I've ever read.

redpanda13 · 01/12/2011 23:06

I enjoyed The Great Gatsby. Flatmate at university was studying English Lit and I read her course books. Or maybe I just remember it fondly because I read it after struggling through One Hundred Years Of Solitude.
Most of the Higher English classes at my school studied To Kill A Mockingbird. Not my class. Oh no we got A Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich. I hated that book. I always wonder if I should read it again and see if I still hate it as much as when I was 15 years old.

tinkertitonk · 01/12/2011 23:24

Hey Bucharest, if you really want to bore people with Keats, make them read Endymion. It's inexcusably dreadful and goes on for ever. Eventually, thank God, he learnt to write short poems and everyone's life improved. Well, not his I suppose, what with TB and Fanny Brawne refusing to shag him.

Kayano · 01/12/2011 23:26

I hated whispers Yeats
And ... looks around James Joyce

And not I look totally anti Irish Blush

claig · 01/12/2011 23:37

Kayano,
with you on James Joyce entirely.
Don't know anything about Keats.

tinkertitonk · 01/12/2011 23:47

Kayano you are my heroine (unless you're my hero). Yeats went straight from juvenile to fascist, even worse than Eliot. Joyce is merely incomprehensible. Mind you he intended to be incomprehensible, you have to respect that.

Kayano · 01/12/2011 23:51

I had to do a full module on Irish Literature and Poetry and those two were the main focus. Needless to say I tried much harder on my other modules to ensure I got my overall result lol.

I just... Hated it! Although I did learn a lot about Irish name pronunciation on the Yeats section Grin

LapsedPacifist · 01/12/2011 23:54

I studied The Great Gatsby for A level English 33 years ago. Didn't quite "get" it then. Still don't.

Does anyone think it's a terrible waste to expect shallow inexperienced self-absorbed 17 year olds (no matter how academically able) to really understand or empathise with complicated works of fiction dealing with adult situations and emotions?

I LOATHED Middlemarch when I was 19. Ditto Anna Karenin. When I re-read them at 32 and 35 respectively I thought they were both amazing and profound works of genius.

Now, at 50, I doubt if I could be bothered with either Hmm.

Doris Lessing has written some very interesting stuff about the dangers of being forced to read books "out of time" for you and your circumstances. She is a great advocate of autodidactism.

Ghoulwithadragontattoo · 02/12/2011 00:06

I much preferred Tender is the Night. Very strange book though.

To Kill a Mockingbird is fabulous and I can't imagine anyone not being touched by it.

claig · 02/12/2011 00:44

'Doris Lessing has written some very interesting stuff about the dangers of being forced to read books "out of time" for you and your circumstances. She is a great advocate of autodidactism'

No, I'm not with her. I haven't really read much literature since school. I tend to read more non-fiction nowadays. But I was introduced to some great authors at school and started working my own way through the pantheon at that time as well. But had I never been introduced to classics with great themes at school, I would never have delved any further.

claig · 02/12/2011 00:47

I did 'The Great Gatsby' at school. On its own that would have put me off for life, but fortunately we studied some great classics as well.

claig · 02/12/2011 00:50

' Joyce is merely incomprehensible. Mind you he intended to be incomprehensible, you have to respect that.'

Agree wit hteh first part, but not teh second. I don't respect that.

No one has mentioned that other pile of c*, "Waiting For Godot".
I'm all for having a laugh, but that is taking the Michael.

Catslikehats · 02/12/2011 03:22

YABU. The Great Gatsby is a beautiful piece of writing and of course the emtiness of the characters is reflective of the world they lived in.

Also loved Bonjour Tristesse which for reasons not all together clear I find very similar.

Bucharest · 02/12/2011 06:28

Oh God, I get to do Joyce with the kids in February. Foreign kids remember, so not only are we trying to make sense of incomprehensible shit, but in a furrin language. We start them off gently with The Dead,and then whoosh, straight into all that gobbledegook. Then we get a lighthearted month on Virginia Woolf Grin

My students hate Keats, hate Wordsworth, but don't seem to mind Shelley.

mummytime · 02/12/2011 06:52

I like Gatsby, but loved it when I first read it in my 20s. Now tend to read it and think about how things have/haven't changed in that part of the US.
I'd recommend Steinbeck, I especially liked the bit in Cannery Row where the wife makes curtains for the drainage pipe she lives in.

Bucharest - just how mad is the person who thinks up that syallabus? Or maybe they just hate literature. I can't imagine my kids enjoying that at that age, and they speak English as their Mother tongue.

neighbourhoodwitch · 02/12/2011 06:52

OMG how could you not love it...:-(

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