Making Good Books A Bit Simpler

guardian.co.uk:

Hark, hark at this righteous rage! Over at the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert is in a right tizz over his discovery of an "intermediate" readers' version of The Great Gatsby. Rather than ending with Fitzgerald's wonderfully evocative "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past", Margaret Tarner's rewritten edition concludes, somewhat more prosaically, "Some unpleasant people became part of Gatsby's dream. But he cannot be blamed for that. Gatsby was a success, in the end, wasn't he?"

Read the whole story: guardian.co.uk

Comments

[Waveskiboy]

04:08 AM on 07/12/2011

I just got my hands on the rewritten ending for the Dumb Ass Publshing House version of Moby Dick: "and Ishmael and Quequeg were ok, after all, and saved Ahab, who thanked them and returned home a changed man...."

[Skyhawk]

01:08 AM on 07/12/2011

The Sherlock Holmes tales are being made into graphic novels.

[Debra Blasi]

11:24 PM on 07/11/2011

Yet another example of the what is now a ceaseless dumbing of Americans, catering to the lowest common denominator, destroying nuance in art and literature, bastardizing poetry, and feeding in word and in deed the oligarchy that so requires an uneducated working (labor) class who cannot interpret language. Shame on the publisher, shame on the writer, shame on anyone who teaches or gives this book as a gift.

[MKWaters esq]

11:06 PM on 07/11/2011

More dumbing down of America! We are no longer the people who meet a challenge, but the people who look for the easy way to avoid it!

[Seedomang]

08:32 PM on 07/11/2011

A travesty let's make it easy for people. Did anyone hear of hard work and a dictionary?

[MayorsRevenge]

08:27 PM on 07/11/2011

Our entire society is dumbed down. Does this surprise anyone?

[mburgh]

06:03 PM on 07/11/2011

Why do you need to dumb down Gatsby? It's not Proust or Faulkner. Just a marketing ploy. And the writer who did this abortion should be shunned. She'd have been better off selling an organ for money that doing this.

[Oneandoneandone]

05:46 PM on 07/11/2011

If you read the alternate version of this book, you aren't reading The Great Gatsby. You can't say, "I'm reading The Great Gatsby," until you are reading Fitzgerald's words. Period.

[Oneandoneandone]

05:41 PM on 07/11/2011

This is pathetic, '"Some unpleasant people became part of Gatsby's dream. But he cannot be blamed for that. Gatsby was a success, in the end, wasn't he?"' I agree with Roger. This is wrong. So completely and utterly wrong.

[Results May Vary]

04:30 PM on 07/11/2011

Gatsby isn't even that tough of a read to begin, I doubt a dumbing down was in any way necessary.

[trespanieli]

02:39 PM on 07/11/2011

How much more dumber down do we have to get before we are too dumbed down? (intentional bad syntax). Me, I'm waiting for The Great Gatsby pop-up book.

[Shakesbird]

04:16 PM on 07/11/2011

LOL : )) or MacBeth in words of one sylable.

[DeeperLove]

12:42 PM on 07/11/2011

Unfortunately, most ESL students are in integrated classes and teachers are not teaching from two versions of the same book, and it's unreasonable to ask us to. Truth is, the educational system, despite teachers wishes is being dumped down because we are forced to teach at a level students understand... Bottomline- students don't read at home, don't participate in class, technology provides instant gratification, and most of their writing is in SMS shortcuts.

[colonelsun68]

07:54 AM on 07/12/2011

Very well said. It is shocking how little consideration is given to reading. Many households do not even own A SINGLE BOOK! But the kids have new cell phones every few months, as well as i-pads, blackberries, and whatever electronic doohickey is the current thing. It is an absolute chore to get many kids to read, or for that matter, to even write an intelligible paragraph.

The most frightening aspect of all this is that many school administrations are not only okay with the dumbing down, but actually support it to level the playing field and "give everyone an opportunity"! And no doubt to make their graduation rates look better!

[TruEngineHearing]

12:23 PM on 07/11/2011

...but no matter what, they are not "far, far better" books.

Jessa Crispin said that as a kid she read books for the story – "...murder and intrigue and violence and revolution – and then for the prose later on, when it wasn't so off-putting."

Ok, fair enough, but not everyone will do the second read, and when Fitzgerald is mentioned in conversation later in life, they might be in a serious disadvantage, having mistakenly based their thinking on the fake book. That's not "far, far, better" anything.

[Dee Brown]

11:31 AM on 07/11/2011

I have to agree with MikeDu rewriting literature is not the answer,improving our education system is.
Leave the classics alone!

[MikeDu]

11:24 AM on 07/11/2011

"Any high-school student who cannot read The Great Gatsby in the original cannot read." I entirely agree with Ebert. For one thing, The Great Gatsby does not exactly match "The Golden Bowl" in complexity. How much simpler could the writing possibly get? Maybe your little Timmy is struggling because he's illiterate. That's not the book's fault, that's yours. For another thing, literature is not just a product to be consumed like a McDonald's Happy Meal, it is supposedly a serious artform. A dumbed down 'kid's portions' book only encourages dumbed down people. And America already has more than its fair share of dumbed down people.

[advocate4undrdog]

01:42 PM on 07/11/2011

"dumbed down" seems to have moved beyond our fair share and into the "norm" as the collective American public.