It will be easy to get my students engaged with the first sentence on page three: My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. Admire the hyphens, first of all. This gradual zoom--what could a zoom be but gradual, I'll propose to the class--on who's narrating, never mind who Gatsby might be.
I blame this on fame. What new might a person say or write about The Great Gatsby. Better to read it, a page a time. So far it's all the narrator's worry over how he hears people, how he got tangled up last summer back East.
But back to My family, in a minute.
Today I asked--in honour of the designation of "selfie" as Word of the Year--what word do you like and why? Write it on the board; we'll all see it. We'll read it out. One of the results was "family," a word selected for meaning only, not sound.
That was fine, of course, but the word that turned out best, for me anyway, was chug, which I've tried to do since then.
The rest of page three gives us Carraway and his story, though not yet his first name. (Pssst, if you've read past 3 don't give it away.)
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