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Last night I accidentally wrote a mini-essay on why I hate The Great Gatsby on my tumblr. WHOOPS. So I am reposting it here since DW is my primary journalling location!
John & Hank Green's youtube channel Crash Course is doing a series on literature, by John Green. And the most recent video from Crash Course Literature was about The Great Gatsby.
I’ve been rereading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, for the tumblr-based Jonathan Strange book club I’m hypothetically taking part in, and reading some other people’s thoughts about JS&MN has confirmed something for me.
See, all of what John Green says in this video about The Great Gatsby is perfectly true! And all of that is valuable stuff to have in a book! Except that the book is SO SO BORING.
John Green talks as if the only thing people who hate TGG hate about it is that its characters are pretty unilaterally unpleasant. Nope. As other people perspicaciously pointed out, JS&MN is full of characters who are terrible human beings (or other kinds of beings), and yet that book is riveting where TGG is stultifyingly boring. I mean, I don’t like the characters in TGG, yeah, and I used to think that’s why I didn’t like it, but I’ve changed my mind. I bet it’d be perfectly possible for someone to write a story about those people and for me to find it interesting. JS&MN is proof that you can have unpleasant people and STILL HAVE AN INTERESTING BOOK! TGG is stultifyingly boring because it is a book that is so in love with its pretentious meaningfulness that it forgot to have any other content. YOU CAN HAVE BOTH. I mean, as I will be saying on my tumblr in a few days (....I mostly post on tumblr through my queue, okay?) about Verity’s Teen Wolf fic about butts, it is both utterly hilarious and actually quite thinky! Having the combination of meaningful thoughts and enjoyable content MAKES BOTH PARTS BETTER FOR THE ASSOCIATION.
It’s like how bread is usually acknowledged to be boring on its own (look, I will happily eat good bread with nothing on it just for the joy of the bread, but I also admit I’m unusual.) and cheese is nasty on its own (there are some people who will happily eat good cheese with nothing else, but they’re unusual too), but if you put them together and fry the whole thing in butter it becomes DELICIOUS. And you might eat the sandwich by itself, or you might choose to add the pickles of likeable characters, or you might prefer to add the ketchup of intricate plotting, or you might even best like to pair it with the raspberry jam of steamy romance! But most people will not appreciate eating nothing but the dry bread on its own.
Sorry, my metaphor might have gotten away with me there. I just have a lot of feels about how awful The Great Gatsby is, gdi, and how it is my least favourite of all the things I have ever had to read for a class and that includes the entirety of The History Of The Peloponnesian War which I fell asleep once while reading.
(maybe I would have a new least favourite if I’d actually done all the readings for my 3rd year lit course in university, because I had some fairly divergent opinions from my prof on what makes for good literature, but you know, The Great Gatsby might still have given those books a pretty strong run for their money.)
(also that lit class gives me another example to add to this conversation: Wuthering Heights. MY GOD EVERYONE IN THAT BOOK IS AN AWFUL HUMAN BEING, but it is so very compelling anyways. I mean yeah, I got distracted halfway through and never finished, but I do that even with books I adore in every single way (cf: HMS Surprise by Patrick O’Brian, and how it took me a year and a half to read….), so it’s not like that’s a comment on the quality of the book’s compellingness)
John & Hank Green's youtube channel Crash Course is doing a series on literature, by John Green. And the most recent video from Crash Course Literature was about The Great Gatsby.
I’ve been rereading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, for the tumblr-based Jonathan Strange book club I’m hypothetically taking part in, and reading some other people’s thoughts about JS&MN has confirmed something for me.
See, all of what John Green says in this video about The Great Gatsby is perfectly true! And all of that is valuable stuff to have in a book! Except that the book is SO SO BORING.
John Green talks as if the only thing people who hate TGG hate about it is that its characters are pretty unilaterally unpleasant. Nope. As other people perspicaciously pointed out, JS&MN is full of characters who are terrible human beings (or other kinds of beings), and yet that book is riveting where TGG is stultifyingly boring. I mean, I don’t like the characters in TGG, yeah, and I used to think that’s why I didn’t like it, but I’ve changed my mind. I bet it’d be perfectly possible for someone to write a story about those people and for me to find it interesting. JS&MN is proof that you can have unpleasant people and STILL HAVE AN INTERESTING BOOK! TGG is stultifyingly boring because it is a book that is so in love with its pretentious meaningfulness that it forgot to have any other content. YOU CAN HAVE BOTH. I mean, as I will be saying on my tumblr in a few days (....I mostly post on tumblr through my queue, okay?) about Verity’s Teen Wolf fic about butts, it is both utterly hilarious and actually quite thinky! Having the combination of meaningful thoughts and enjoyable content MAKES BOTH PARTS BETTER FOR THE ASSOCIATION.
It’s like how bread is usually acknowledged to be boring on its own (look, I will happily eat good bread with nothing on it just for the joy of the bread, but I also admit I’m unusual.) and cheese is nasty on its own (there are some people who will happily eat good cheese with nothing else, but they’re unusual too), but if you put them together and fry the whole thing in butter it becomes DELICIOUS. And you might eat the sandwich by itself, or you might choose to add the pickles of likeable characters, or you might prefer to add the ketchup of intricate plotting, or you might even best like to pair it with the raspberry jam of steamy romance! But most people will not appreciate eating nothing but the dry bread on its own.
Sorry, my metaphor might have gotten away with me there. I just have a lot of feels about how awful The Great Gatsby is, gdi, and how it is my least favourite of all the things I have ever had to read for a class and that includes the entirety of The History Of The Peloponnesian War which I fell asleep once while reading.
(maybe I would have a new least favourite if I’d actually done all the readings for my 3rd year lit course in university, because I had some fairly divergent opinions from my prof on what makes for good literature, but you know, The Great Gatsby might still have given those books a pretty strong run for their money.)
(also that lit class gives me another example to add to this conversation: Wuthering Heights. MY GOD EVERYONE IN THAT BOOK IS AN AWFUL HUMAN BEING, but it is so very compelling anyways. I mean yeah, I got distracted halfway through and never finished, but I do that even with books I adore in every single way (cf: HMS Surprise by Patrick O’Brian, and how it took me a year and a half to read….), so it’s not like that’s a comment on the quality of the book’s compellingness)
