Lili Saintcrow: I certainly hope they got consent from the authors/estate holders for this bowdlerization, or that they have confined themselves to out-of-copyright works.

I certainly hope they got consent from the authors/estate holders for this bowdlerization, or that they have confined themselves to out-of-copyright works.

I can’t think of a clever caption for this. It just breaks my fucking heart.

(Also, Gatsby? A hard book? What the ever-loving fuck?)

Everything difficult about that book isn't the /prose/.

Only in that spending time with some of the characters without being able to hit them in the face with a whiskey tumbler is hard.

The towering achievement of that book is that EVERYONE in it is mind-bogglingly awful.

It’s an impressive feat of “the worst people you know make each other miserable.” Even Huis Clos doesn’t match it.

Even the walk-on characters and NPCs are awful. The only one I found faintly decent was the other guy who attended Gatsby's funeral, the owl-glasses dude, and even he only came out of curiousity after badmouthing him during the party. Like, EVERYONE is just terrible. What an achievement!

Tom Buchanan would be the first rich guy to be eaten when the revolution comes

Also sometimes it's hard to make yourself keep reading a book when you hate all of the characters.

I should think it depends on the type of hatred. One hates all Gatsby's characters because one has met every single one IRL; he makes them pathetically understandable at the same time. OTOH, I've bounced off books where I've met the characters in meatspace and that's precisely the *problem*...

I mean to be fair I never finished reading Gatsby in high school but to be equally fair I never actually started it. In continued fairness Gatsby came right after THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM and THE JUNGLE and AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY and I was kinda noping out of the entire class.

Oh good Lord, what misery! I'm not surprised you noped out.

I mean that series of books was one reason I skipped my senior year of high school. Not the only reason, but one of them.

I honestly don't blame you. That's a lot of oof in a short while.

It was at least pretty short and less painful (at least for me) than Catcher in the Rye or A Separate Peace.

It's hard when you are assigned to read it in high school and you'd rather be TikToking. #WeAreDoomed

Which is hilarious, because if any book deserves TikTok treatment it's Gatsby! The whole thing is just a series of escalating shitposts waiting to happen!

And one of the reasons Gatsby is still so good is the prose itself. That same story written by someone else would be wildly different.

Yes. It's marvelously flexible and specific prose. One understands why Hemingway was so envious of Fitzgerald, and Hem's satisfaction so ill-concealed as Fitz's alcoholism mounted.

I had to immediately close out the app when I saw that, blood pressure spiked so hard 💚

This isn't the first time it's been tried, either! I remember that Inktera/Page Foundry thing, and how fast that had to be walked back. But then, I'm old...

I think I was pretty much offline during that furore which is a good thing even tho it wasn't a good time. 💚

I may have waxed furious over the whole thing. I can still remember my feeling of, "the FUCK you say?" ...maybe I should go make some tea. My own blood pressure is beginning to climb.

Grab yourself a biscuit too, it's difficult to be aggro with a spot of proper tea and an ickle treat 💚

This reminds me of books “adapted” for young readers which just seemed like watered down “diet” versions. Less filling, less flavor! (I always felt insulted as a kid if I picked up a book and saw it was “adapted for kids”, and I’d go look for the real version instead)

Yeah, me too. I was *infuriated* at "adapted" versions and immediately went on quests for the Real Stuff.

I think this must be the case. Most of these are just book mills that don’t want to spend a cent or ounce of effort they don’t have to, just generate a digital copy and sell it. I could see this being a cool idea, if the author is on board and it’s being re-written manually with intention and care

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