I had to Read it in School

Yesterday, I took 20 minutes of my evening to play an 8-bit Nintendo-like video game of The Great Gatsby. It is four stages long and pretty forgiving, so I urge all of you to check it out: [link]

I found that one can't really get a sense of the novel through the game (not too surprising), and I should know, because I remember almost nothing about the book. Nevertheless, I found the effort to turn the novel into a colorful side-scroller extremely charming. You smack enemies with your porkpie hat that flies like a boomerang. There are enemies that drink a bottle empty and then throw it at you. There are enemies that look like they're dancing the Charleston.

And the first stage, with the stuffy waiters and lines of bookshelves, looks exactly like I thought an 8-bit Gatsby game would. The cutscenes are fantastic, and echo the 8-bit classic Ninja Gaiden.

Playing the game got me thinking about the novels I had to read in high school. I made a list of them and found that aside from Of Mice and Men, and Frankenstein, I don't remember much about any of them. I remember more, in fact, from a reading frenzy I underwent the summer after high school, when I read Born on the 4th of July, Brave New World, 1984 and others.

At any rate, I drew this comic after thinking about these things. There were three panels, but I cut the middle one out because it was contradictory to the third and unnecessary overall. The "link" between the first and second panel is the only digital work in the comic (thank you clone stamp!).

I tried to come up with a ridiculous title for a 20th century novel. I don't know if I found one, but I couldn't quite go with "The Novel Novelist." I tried to make the English teacher look neither young nor hideous.

I loved drawing the smattering of pages.

We really read some of the classics at a mad pace. I imagine a third of the kids in my class didn't read much of them at all. I read every page, yet, I retained so little.

I'm a slow reader, I guess.