The Great Gatsby was the first book I read this summer. Although I enjoyed it, it felt tedious at times, especially when annotating. To be honest, I haven't (yet) come to enjoy annotating, because I feel like it directs my attention away from the story and serves more as a distraction than anything, so I would prefer jotting down some reactions at the end of a chapter, or reading the chapter and going back through it to annotate. However, I realize that annotating will come in handy in college and that I should learn to like it.
Regardless of my feelings toward this process, for The Great Gatsby I mostly experimented with the "text to world"/"creating trails" style of annotation, because there were many social issues in this book that I felt not only painted a picture of society in the 1920's, but that are also relevant to modern day. The language was a bit hard to understand at times, so I felt that I often needed this type of annotation as well to analyze certain sentences or paragraphs that didn't at first make sense. My other reason for preferring this type was that the deeper themes in the book were hard to pick up on because the story seemed shallow at first glance--which is maybe why I found parts of it to be tedious. But I believe one of the big messages is that Gatsby is a metaphor for the classic Alger-style American dream, and how this idea is not always desirable, necessary for happiness, or even achievable. I also occasionally used the "text to self"/"establishing territory" style of annotating in this book, because there were many emotional and social situations that directly relate to my life, and if I read this book again I might be able to pick up even more connections. Sometimes I even used the "reading to writing"/"learning to write" style, because I found Fitzgerald's choice of vocabulary to be archaic and fascinating, and I would love to add some of his techniques to my writing style.
I found The Great Gatsby to be interesting overall, with a message that I hadn't thought about before and an exciting setting that I hadn't had the opportunity to learn much about.
"To be honest, I haven't (yet) come to enjoy annotating, because I feel like it directs my attention away from the story and serves more as a distraction than anything, so I would prefer jotting down some reactions at the end of a chapter, or reading the chapter and going back through it to annotate. However, I realize that annotating will come in handy in college and that I should learn to like it." I have always felt the same. I struggled through college in all my non-English classes because I never really found a style that worked for me. I liked the website that I referred you all to because it seemed like it had something new/different to offer. I liked the summarizing chapters suggestion and some pieces of others. I think if I were to go back I'd use parts of all the strategies to make one that worked for me. Good luck! :)
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