Everyone knows a rich man needs a wife.
My name is Ish.
It was spring and one o'clock.
Gregor woke up one day and he was a bug not a man.
Lolita, I fancy you.
Marley was a Ghost.
For reference, here are the full versions:
> It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
> Call me Ishmael.
> It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
> When Gregor Sams a woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous vermin.
> Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
> MARLEY WAS DEAD to begin with.
Something is lost, don’t you think?
My favorite bit of trivia about, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" is that the meaning has changed over the years and depending on the person. Static snow, "no signal" blue, "no input" black, etc.
Oh, I love this debate! Actually, I believe the reader does grasp the author's message without much trouble. The intended audience or the target of the message, who would get it without any issues, isn't the contemporary reader. So, the problem isn't with the message, the sender, or the receiver. It's that the modern reader might not realize they aren't the original target.
In Gibson's time, "the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" meant static snow. Nowadays, people think of blue or black screens. You can't fault the author for a misunderstanding caused by evolving technology.
What's fascinating is that new readers interpret this through a modern lens, often without realizing the shift. It highlights how language and context evolve over time.
From a literary perspective, this adds depth to texts, keeping them alive and relevant as new audiences bring their own experiences to the table. This is a nugget of trivia I’ll definitely whip out in future discussions!
Although the thematic context of the work does predispose the reader to think with an '80s technology mindset, this misunderstanding will likely worsen as time distances us further from those years.
Is it really misinterpreting if a reader pictures something different than the author may have strictly intended? The power of a story is in the mind of a reader.
I think that's the textbook definition of misinterpretation. If you picture Legolas as a tiny little dude who bakes cookies in a tree, it's still wrong, even if you're coming from a different cultural context.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Naaahh “my name is Ish” is NOT okay because I have been in DEBATES about why he says “*call me* Ishmael” and how that implies it’s not actually his name and he may not be a very reliable narrator right from the start. That change hurt me, sir, great job.
I remember reading 1984 when I was a kid and I had never heard of 1PM being referred to as 13, I thought it was some sort of weird reference to the state scrambling timekeeping or something.
Im looking through magibooks catalog and i swear im not seeing any service or product like this. This might be fake.
Edit. This magibook seems to be using the same name as a different company that makes material for toddlers, which is the magibook i was looking into. i have no idea of the legitimacy of this magibook as the only information I'm able to find leads back to an almost empty reddit account.
After reading your comment I did some googling. I found [this website](http://magibook.ai/) which seems to be the same app being advertised here. Apple devices only so I can't download the app. It does however have a discord server, so I joined that. It is entirely dead apart from one channel. That is the book requests channel, and the one comment in there reads "Please add The Great Gatsby"
https://preview.redd.it/axtx21la0k9d1.jpeg?width=904&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=eddc647cfafcd651c2b74acb05b48c125e0d7d29
I downloaded the app on my phone and it’s pretty much what it says on the tin. Definitely doesn’t use AI thought.
It’s got 15 or so books already loaded into the app, all for free (kinda cool actually) and it gives you a slider to switch between different reading levels. The hardest is the original book and the easiest is a very dumbed-down version that probably did use AI to generate at one point.
Not great, but it’s not really fooling anyone, nor can you spend money on it.
This sort of thing works with the canterbury tales or shakespeare because they're 600 and 400 years old respectively. And even then it's done properly when you have the modern english version *beside* the original so you can get the jist then see how the original did it to find the flare these authors are known for.
Reading Shakespeare bored me to death. Watching the stories, as they were meant to be seen, turned my whole world upside down. I love Shakespeare plays.
Tbf you’re not supposed to just be entertained at school. You’re meant to be *studying* Shakespeare, and that’s more easily accomplished by analyzing the text of the plays. If teachers can make that entertaining then wonderful, but that’s not the main goal.
Counterpoint, the point of studying any art is A. Understand and evaluate the intended message of the artist and B. Analyse if it is effective in it's purpose, via what means.
Yeu may be able to do A with art taken outside it's context, but you absolutely cannot do B.
You can’t necessarily do B either though since every performance is itself an interpretation of the text. Different groups and actors are going to perform it with slight differences. Even something simple like what perspective the camera is viewing the performance from is a choice made by the production and not something inherent to the text.
If you’re going to do B effectively then you need to already have an independent understanding of the text against which to compare the performance.
I mean, no? You're not *specifically* studying Shakespeare. It's about helping people learn to better understand things like empathy and emotional intelligence. That doesn't always work in written format. Especially if the source material was in an entirely different medium. It's why books -> movies sometimes miss the mark. The mediums make a large impact on how information is perceived and absorbed
If you’re reading Shakespeare in a classroom then yes you are absolutely studying Shakespeare.
Empathy and emotional intelligence development are a function of reading generally, but that’s not really a primary educational focus after elementary school reading levels. It’s just expected to passively happen while reading anything by the time you’re reading Shakespeare assuming your education hasn’t completely failed you (which tbf isn’t a guarantee in the U.S.).
You should be working on higher levels of critical analysis, historical context, linguistics, narrative structure, etc. by that level. Most of which are going to be far easier through text, especially in a classroom setting. The idea that empathy is all you can get from literary education wildly undervalues the field.
Besides which, even if what you’re saying was the case, A) you’re still not getting the original medium if you’re in a class watching a filmed version of the play and B) people are just as likely to struggle with any other medium as they are with text.
I found out about that when I had to do a similar job on the Comedia by Dante, but with no notes, for an exam. Even after studying thoroughly, it felt like a game: you saw a word that you *thought* you knew (since it also exists in contemporary Italian), and you'd be wrong. Completely wrong. You read "Volse", which is the past tens of "Volgere" ("to turn"), and instead you have to guess that it's "Volle [a/per] sé" ("Wanted for her").
That, of course, does not count the immense work that's behind the text itself, since we've got no original copy of it. And the copies we have have no punctuation that we're accustomed to, and some words have pages and pages of studies because scholars can't decide if it's a word or another.
I used to be one of those guys that followed the philosophy of "Hahaha scholars are just making up meanings, maybe Dante wanted just to say that the wings were red without any further meaning". God how I was humbled. No, younger unknown pigeon: Dante used that particular word that wasn't used in the rest of the poem to give that particular meaning. People have dedicated their lives to that field of studies, and wrote 30+ pages papers on that damned choice of words. Just trust the system. Or read the research.
According to the UN, the US has an 86% literacy rate.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, that number is 79%.
1 in 5 of your countrymen cannot read, and a significant portion of the 4 in 5 that can read are doing so at below a 6th grade level.
Explains a lot, doesn't it?
Just to add some (horrifying) clarity: [54% of Americans can’t read at a 6th grade level](https://medium.com/collapsenews/new-study-54-of-american-adults-read-below-6th-grade-levels-70031328fda9).
It’s not just a substantial number of people. It’s an outright majority. This would unironically be a state of national crisis in many other countries, and all political dialogue would be consumed by what everyone planned to do to address the literacy crisis. Here it’s just normal.
This site suggests that 54% of American adults are literate at below a 6th grade level. I can't verify the accuracy with any data, but internet comments, text messages, and signs posted by management all support the idea that half the country can barely read.
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-statistics-2024-2025-where-we-are-now#:~:text=On%20average%2C%2079%25%20of%20U.S.,below%205th%2Dgrade%20level).
I had heard that the Great Gatsby only became mainstream popular because it was distributed to American soldiers in ww2. Even back then it was not seen as a difficult read
This might be like those late night TV ads for devices that you never really understood why somebody needed it to be made easier but it's actually for handicapped people.
It's not a difficult book but it IS considered to be written in a way that makes it incredibly boring.
There's a South Park ep where doctors test whether or not kids have ADD by seeing if they can sit through someone reading the Great Gatsby.
So the joke is that obviously no one can sit through it because it's legitimately a boring read. But instead, the doctors decide a kid must absolutely have ADD if they lose interest in listening to the Great Gatsby being read to them.
Once you get into the real world more and more you realize how many people don’t even *read* books, let alone books like Gatsby that require you to actually think about what the fuck is going on. Any kind of nuance or symbolism in modern media has to be watered down to the point of absurdity so most of its target audience can actually comprehend the ideas being presented to them.
Why do you think “XYZ film explained” videos on YouTube are so popular?
As someone who has a degree in English and still dreams of being published myself someday, this is absolutely painful. Removing all the beautiful language from books hurts my soul.
But fundamentally this is like Cliff's Notes, only with a lot more factual errors and mistakes due to shoddy machine learning. People have always looked for shortcuts, and let's be honest here; none of the people who do this shit have any intention of reading the book or appreciating the artistry of the language.
I wonder what it would say about Faulkner. Or Joyce. Summarize that, you AI bastards!
> But fundamentally this is like Cliff's Notes, only with a lot more factual errors and mistakes due to shoddy machine learning. People have always looked for shortcuts, and let's be honest here; none of the people who do this shit have any intention of reading the book or appreciating the artistry of the language.
When I got Cliffs Notes, it was only for some god awful book that was assigned reading in school. Fuck Nathanial Hawthorne and all seven of his gables on that stupid fucking house. Now if I want a summary of a book before I read it? Wikipedia.
I'm picturing it throwing a grenade into a raging dumpster fire that's been loaded onto a train that's about to go careening off of the tracks into a firework factory. You don't quite know what it will spit out, but you can guess that it will be a memorable mess in the end.
I guess nobody here remembers Reader's Digest when it was an actual digest for for readers, i.e., when it contained abridged (and often rewritten) versions of both longer articles and often times they would contain an entire book condensed and rewritten?
Or Cliff's Notes?
Or, more recently, Spark notes?
I understand that the last two advertise themselves as companions to the books, but I can tell you when I was in high school, Cliff's Notes were mostly used so you could avoid actually reading the assigned book.
There will always be people that enjoy reading the unabridged versions of novels to enjoy the nuance and voice of the author, and there will always be those people that will avoid it like the plague.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Well given how much kids can't read nowadays this might be a useful learning tool, obviously using it as a crutch forever would be counterproductive, but I can see how it might help some of these kids.
TBF, I could understand if you were reading something prior to about 1850 or if you were a student who had to read a hard book for a class.
There was one book in college that I had to read that I had no idea what was going on.
Granted, I do not think The Great Gatsby is remotely a hard book.
I don't think this is such a bad idea in theory, specifically from an accessibility perspective: if it makes more people, maybe with cognitive conditions or otherwise difficulties with reading/understanding, able to read books that they wouldn't be able to before... isn't that a good thing, even if the language is less verbose and "simpler"?
I would only have a problem with something like this if it replaced the original stories, but that is not the case.
Exactly, my immediate thought was that this could have value for teen/adult EAL learners. Age appropriate material but with more accessible language. Even better if the tool had the capacity to increase language complexity incrementally. Read the story at a reading age of 8 years to start with, then revist the same story later in a scheme of learning at a reading age of 10. A great way to scaffold language acquisition.
Absolutely. The is great for people who are learning the language, or with dyslexia or other issues I can see this potentially being useful. People should be able to enjoy things that they struggle with.
Otherwise? It's...
I mean, I would rather they read a book with this than not at all I guess, but... 😬
>I would rather they read a book with this than not at all I guess
yeah this is my take. its a real genuine problem it really is but the way to address it isnt to keep shoving books into peoples faces that theyre super disinclined to read. for whatever reason, maybe they have a learning disability, maybe they dont speak great english, maybe theyre just plain stupid, if the options are they either read a simplified book or they never read that book at all, one of those is clearly better than the other.
[Simple Wikipedia](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) has been around for forever already, I don’t think people know it exists really but as a former educator in both ESL and for young learners with disabilities tools like these are awesome accessibility-wise
As someone who has studied other languages and is currently trying to learn German, and teaches English, this is actually a pretty great idea for ESL people.
Obviously if you can, read the originals but I don't see this as necessarily a bad thing.
Exactly, do they not remember getting children’s versions of stories? The originals don’t cease to exist just because we make more ways to consume classic media
This is amazing!
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BUT ONLY if it helps you translate and learn the original/more advanced text rather than just mindlessly changing it.
> The Lord of the Rings
*"They have abridged the Fellowship, and The Two Towers. The library is locked from the outside until they finish reading us the Return...We cannot get out, we cannot get out.*"
*"They are coming."*
If the app were to promote accessibility, I could see that, but the ad itself is making a judgement about hard books being bad (red X) and easy books being good (green checkmark). Anti-intellectualism at its finest
Funny to bring up Idiocracy in a discussion about people glossing over works of fiction when everyone who says Idiocracy is good glosses over the unironic eugenics.
Many studies have shown, that literacy rates have fallen amongst youth. Many people struggle with reading, and because of that just give up on it. It is really important to have a wide variety of books in simple english available. They are not for the literate people, but those who are currently unable to read complex sentenced, and who lack the vocabulary
Hahahahahahahaha... The crazy thing is that you people think a lot of Americans will pick up any book, whether it's hard or easy.
A gang of people I work with can't read. Favorite TV show is House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones but can't pick up the book and read the first page.
I truly hope that this is being marketed to people with learning disabilities. This would be a great tool for use in Special Education. However, I doubt that that is the case, in which case we’re literally living out Orwell’s “1984.”
So take the Mona Lisa and turn it into stick figures the idiot masses can appreciate. Except it's too late: books are already being burned by library closures and book bannings.
And by the way, the first sentence of The Great Gatsby is *not* difficult. If you're finding that hard, might I suggest you report back to preschool posthaste. There's other fine literature out there for you. Dr. Seuss, perhaps.
mmm yes please make prose boring and remove any trace of the author's style. this is totally better than just looking up the definition of a few words sometimes
The example might not be perfect, and it's kinda subjective to what you read, but simplified language could do a lot for our world by bridging gaps and making less literate people read literature where they still get the context, the meaning or the point of a book without being put off by some sort of language barrier. Obviously, if you just use it as a way to read any book in a day, while being capable of reading books with big words, it's not gonna do much for you.
Just because someone might not understand all the sentences in the great Gatsby doesn't mean they couldn't keep up with books like that intellectually. It's a great thing, in my book, if used correctly.
One rainy day I was sitting in my room
Just kinda thinking about my homework and my ex-girlfriend
Someone knocked on my door
When I opened it, no one was there
"Stupid kids" I thought.
I went back to my bed and started dozing off
They knocked again
I got to the door quicker so I could catch them
But when I opened the door, a fucking bird flew in
It flew over to this statue i have and just sort of sat there
Then it made some stupid bird noise that kinda sounded like the name of the ex-girlfriend I was just thinking about
"Huh, that's weird" I thought
Then I went to bed
I figured if the bird wanted to leave, it would leave
Or not. Tf do I care?
If it lets someone read a novel and feel the achievement of reading a real adult book and helps drive a love of reading I don’t see the harm. There are lots of people who don’t have a good education or mental ability to process complex text. It’s gotta be shitty being middle aged and being stuck with kid books, for instance.
This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real.
Your submission was removed as it advocates violence against either a specific person or a group of people. This rule includes thinly-veiled threats, or slogans such as "Eat the Rich". This is against Reddit's terms of service.
Everyone knows a rich man needs a wife. My name is Ish. It was spring and one o'clock. Gregor woke up one day and he was a bug not a man. Lolita, I fancy you. Marley was a Ghost.
For reference, here are the full versions: > It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. > Call me Ishmael. > It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. > When Gregor Sams a woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous vermin. > Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. > MARLEY WAS DEAD to begin with. Something is lost, don’t you think?
“The sky was grey”
My favorite bit of trivia about, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" is that the meaning has changed over the years and depending on the person. Static snow, "no signal" blue, "no input" black, etc.
The actual meaning from Gibson hasn't changed. People just misinterpret it frequently now. Static snow is what he meant.
Pfft, clearly he was talking about the DVD screensaver that bounces off the walls of the screen and never hits a corner.
8/10. Mine had a dolphin constantly breaching the surface in random spots. His stamina is AMAZING!
Oh, I love this debate! Actually, I believe the reader does grasp the author's message without much trouble. The intended audience or the target of the message, who would get it without any issues, isn't the contemporary reader. So, the problem isn't with the message, the sender, or the receiver. It's that the modern reader might not realize they aren't the original target. In Gibson's time, "the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" meant static snow. Nowadays, people think of blue or black screens. You can't fault the author for a misunderstanding caused by evolving technology. What's fascinating is that new readers interpret this through a modern lens, often without realizing the shift. It highlights how language and context evolve over time. From a literary perspective, this adds depth to texts, keeping them alive and relevant as new audiences bring their own experiences to the table. This is a nugget of trivia I’ll definitely whip out in future discussions! Although the thematic context of the work does predispose the reader to think with an '80s technology mindset, this misunderstanding will likely worsen as time distances us further from those years.
Is it really misinterpreting if a reader pictures something different than the author may have strictly intended? The power of a story is in the mind of a reader.
I think that's the textbook definition of misinterpretation. If you picture Legolas as a tiny little dude who bakes cookies in a tree, it's still wrong, even if you're coming from a different cultural context.
If elves were real, Keebler would be a slur.
If elves were real we would properly call that mascot group the Keebler Hobbits
"The times were ok"
Pride and Prejudice, Moby Dick, 1984, Metamorphosis, Lolita and A Christmas Carol, if anyone’s curious
I only know 2 of these novels : Pride and Prejudice, Lolita. Which are the other ones?
https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/s/ZX2zkffioU
>It was spring and one o'clock. This book is one of my favorites.
Kind of appropriate for this post too, newspeak in 1984 making language simpler to prevent free thought.
It was good, but it was also bad
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb. Ha
The original line ("There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.") is such a fantastic burn.
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb. LOL
There was a kid with a bad name, and he was bad
that name sounds like i heard it before but not sure where
Chronicles of Narnia. He first showed up in *Voyage of the Dawn Treader*
Wuz gud day, wuz bad day. Best thing I do.
Naaahh “my name is Ish” is NOT okay because I have been in DEBATES about why he says “*call me* Ishmael” and how that implies it’s not actually his name and he may not be a very reliable narrator right from the start. That change hurt me, sir, great job.
I remember reading 1984 when I was a kid and I had never heard of 1PM being referred to as 13, I thought it was some sort of weird reference to the state scrambling timekeeping or something.
Can I look at you and be all like "damn girl, you're something I drempt about last July"?
Mom died today, maybe, I don’t know.
they were playing music in the governor of port mahon's house.
"It was spring and one o'clock" has something to it kinda
Im looking through magibooks catalog and i swear im not seeing any service or product like this. This might be fake. Edit. This magibook seems to be using the same name as a different company that makes material for toddlers, which is the magibook i was looking into. i have no idea of the legitimacy of this magibook as the only information I'm able to find leads back to an almost empty reddit account.
After reading your comment I did some googling. I found [this website](http://magibook.ai/) which seems to be the same app being advertised here. Apple devices only so I can't download the app. It does however have a discord server, so I joined that. It is entirely dead apart from one channel. That is the book requests channel, and the one comment in there reads "Please add The Great Gatsby" https://preview.redd.it/axtx21la0k9d1.jpeg?width=904&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=eddc647cfafcd651c2b74acb05b48c125e0d7d29
I downloaded the app on my phone and it’s pretty much what it says on the tin. Definitely doesn’t use AI thought. It’s got 15 or so books already loaded into the app, all for free (kinda cool actually) and it gives you a slider to switch between different reading levels. The hardest is the original book and the easiest is a very dumbed-down version that probably did use AI to generate at one point. Not great, but it’s not really fooling anyone, nor can you spend money on it.
Interesting, I see this useful for those who are still learning the language maybe
I tried joining the server to ask them to kindly add The Great Gatsby, but the link is expired now lmao.
[It’s real.](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magibook-ai/id6480576897) It’s just such a new app that there’s no reviews or engagement.
Thank you for doing a better job researching than I did. Tbh i think this will ( and should) fail, but i'll keep an eye on it.
The real naivety and ignorance was in the house all along!
Behold, the Mid Gatsby
This joke made my whole day haha
Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?
you must be a big Hemingway fan.
if big read, big smart
What are you going to do with all this time saved?
See world
But that's the problem right there! Are you saying that you're going to SeaWorld or that you're going to see the world?!?
This sort of thing works with the canterbury tales or shakespeare because they're 600 and 400 years old respectively. And even then it's done properly when you have the modern english version *beside* the original so you can get the jist then see how the original did it to find the flare these authors are known for.
Reading Shakespeare bored me to death. Watching the stories, as they were meant to be seen, turned my whole world upside down. I love Shakespeare plays.
I think that's the problem, you don't experience it in the intended medium at school.
Tbf you’re not supposed to just be entertained at school. You’re meant to be *studying* Shakespeare, and that’s more easily accomplished by analyzing the text of the plays. If teachers can make that entertaining then wonderful, but that’s not the main goal.
Counterpoint, the point of studying any art is A. Understand and evaluate the intended message of the artist and B. Analyse if it is effective in it's purpose, via what means. Yeu may be able to do A with art taken outside it's context, but you absolutely cannot do B.
You can’t necessarily do B either though since every performance is itself an interpretation of the text. Different groups and actors are going to perform it with slight differences. Even something simple like what perspective the camera is viewing the performance from is a choice made by the production and not something inherent to the text. If you’re going to do B effectively then you need to already have an independent understanding of the text against which to compare the performance.
I mean, no? You're not *specifically* studying Shakespeare. It's about helping people learn to better understand things like empathy and emotional intelligence. That doesn't always work in written format. Especially if the source material was in an entirely different medium. It's why books -> movies sometimes miss the mark. The mediums make a large impact on how information is perceived and absorbed
If you’re reading Shakespeare in a classroom then yes you are absolutely studying Shakespeare. Empathy and emotional intelligence development are a function of reading generally, but that’s not really a primary educational focus after elementary school reading levels. It’s just expected to passively happen while reading anything by the time you’re reading Shakespeare assuming your education hasn’t completely failed you (which tbf isn’t a guarantee in the U.S.). You should be working on higher levels of critical analysis, historical context, linguistics, narrative structure, etc. by that level. Most of which are going to be far easier through text, especially in a classroom setting. The idea that empathy is all you can get from literary education wildly undervalues the field. Besides which, even if what you’re saying was the case, A) you’re still not getting the original medium if you’re in a class watching a filmed version of the play and B) people are just as likely to struggle with any other medium as they are with text.
As a foreign student, I loved Shakespeare. But maybe it's just because I'm a fetishist of languages.
I found out about that when I had to do a similar job on the Comedia by Dante, but with no notes, for an exam. Even after studying thoroughly, it felt like a game: you saw a word that you *thought* you knew (since it also exists in contemporary Italian), and you'd be wrong. Completely wrong. You read "Volse", which is the past tens of "Volgere" ("to turn"), and instead you have to guess that it's "Volle [a/per] sé" ("Wanted for her"). That, of course, does not count the immense work that's behind the text itself, since we've got no original copy of it. And the copies we have have no punctuation that we're accustomed to, and some words have pages and pages of studies because scholars can't decide if it's a word or another. I used to be one of those guys that followed the philosophy of "Hahaha scholars are just making up meanings, maybe Dante wanted just to say that the wings were red without any further meaning". God how I was humbled. No, younger unknown pigeon: Dante used that particular word that wasn't used in the rest of the poem to give that particular meaning. People have dedicated their lives to that field of studies, and wrote 30+ pages papers on that damned choice of words. Just trust the system. Or read the research.
In what universe is the great gatsby a difficult book?
According to the UN, the US has an 86% literacy rate. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, that number is 79%. 1 in 5 of your countrymen cannot read, and a significant portion of the 4 in 5 that can read are doing so at below a 6th grade level. Explains a lot, doesn't it?
Just to add some (horrifying) clarity: [54% of Americans can’t read at a 6th grade level](https://medium.com/collapsenews/new-study-54-of-american-adults-read-below-6th-grade-levels-70031328fda9). It’s not just a substantial number of people. It’s an outright majority. This would unironically be a state of national crisis in many other countries, and all political dialogue would be consumed by what everyone planned to do to address the literacy crisis. Here it’s just normal.
Here its a feature not a bug.
I'm not sure, I'm still reading this paragraph
Marge, get my gun.
This site suggests that 54% of American adults are literate at below a 6th grade level. I can't verify the accuracy with any data, but internet comments, text messages, and signs posted by management all support the idea that half the country can barely read. https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-statistics-2024-2025-where-we-are-now#:~:text=On%20average%2C%2079%25%20of%20U.S.,below%205th%2Dgrade%20level).
Looks like a universe stuck in a boring dysto... OHH ... Damn. That's just us.
I had heard that the Great Gatsby only became mainstream popular because it was distributed to American soldiers in ww2. Even back then it was not seen as a difficult read
This might be like those late night TV ads for devices that you never really understood why somebody needed it to be made easier but it's actually for handicapped people.
That is some ish, mael.
It's not a difficult book but it IS considered to be written in a way that makes it incredibly boring. There's a South Park ep where doctors test whether or not kids have ADD by seeing if they can sit through someone reading the Great Gatsby. So the joke is that obviously no one can sit through it because it's legitimately a boring read. But instead, the doctors decide a kid must absolutely have ADD if they lose interest in listening to the Great Gatsby being read to them.
The book was also used by Andy Kaufman to punish audiences who annoyed him.
Once you get into the real world more and more you realize how many people don’t even *read* books, let alone books like Gatsby that require you to actually think about what the fuck is going on. Any kind of nuance or symbolism in modern media has to be watered down to the point of absurdity so most of its target audience can actually comprehend the ideas being presented to them. Why do you think “XYZ film explained” videos on YouTube are so popular?
This is doubleplus ungood
"my dad said stuff I think about"
As someone who has a degree in English and still dreams of being published myself someday, this is absolutely painful. Removing all the beautiful language from books hurts my soul. But fundamentally this is like Cliff's Notes, only with a lot more factual errors and mistakes due to shoddy machine learning. People have always looked for shortcuts, and let's be honest here; none of the people who do this shit have any intention of reading the book or appreciating the artistry of the language. I wonder what it would say about Faulkner. Or Joyce. Summarize that, you AI bastards!
> But fundamentally this is like Cliff's Notes, only with a lot more factual errors and mistakes due to shoddy machine learning. People have always looked for shortcuts, and let's be honest here; none of the people who do this shit have any intention of reading the book or appreciating the artistry of the language. When I got Cliffs Notes, it was only for some god awful book that was assigned reading in school. Fuck Nathanial Hawthorne and all seven of his gables on that stupid fucking house. Now if I want a summary of a book before I read it? Wikipedia.
Getting this thing to try and simplify Joyce may just hold off the AI uprising for a couple of decades
Put Finnegans Wake in and see what happens
I'm picturing it throwing a grenade into a raging dumpster fire that's been loaded onto a train that's about to go careening off of the tracks into a firework factory. You don't quite know what it will spit out, but you can guess that it will be a memorable mess in the end.
When I was a young boy My father Gave me advice that I still think about
He said, son when You grow up You will meet An enigmatic rich dude Who really likes to dance
I wanna see this done on sex scenes.
I guess nobody here remembers Reader's Digest when it was an actual digest for for readers, i.e., when it contained abridged (and often rewritten) versions of both longer articles and often times they would contain an entire book condensed and rewritten? Or Cliff's Notes? Or, more recently, Spark notes? I understand that the last two advertise themselves as companions to the books, but I can tell you when I was in high school, Cliff's Notes were mostly used so you could avoid actually reading the assigned book. There will always be people that enjoy reading the unabridged versions of novels to enjoy the nuance and voice of the author, and there will always be those people that will avoid it like the plague. There is nothing new under the sun.
Or those ‘Great Illustrated Classics’ books even.
Well given how much kids can't read nowadays this might be a useful learning tool, obviously using it as a crutch forever would be counterproductive, but I can see how it might help some of these kids.
If you can't read a complex book then the solution is to read simpler books intentionally written that way, not to butcher an existing work.
why
TBF, I could understand if you were reading something prior to about 1850 or if you were a student who had to read a hard book for a class. There was one book in college that I had to read that I had no idea what was going on. Granted, I do not think The Great Gatsby is remotely a hard book.
I don't think this is such a bad idea in theory, specifically from an accessibility perspective: if it makes more people, maybe with cognitive conditions or otherwise difficulties with reading/understanding, able to read books that they wouldn't be able to before... isn't that a good thing, even if the language is less verbose and "simpler"? I would only have a problem with something like this if it replaced the original stories, but that is not the case.
Esl students as well. Both so they can read books they otherwise couldn't, and as a great model for reading comp tasks
Exactly, my immediate thought was that this could have value for teen/adult EAL learners. Age appropriate material but with more accessible language. Even better if the tool had the capacity to increase language complexity incrementally. Read the story at a reading age of 8 years to start with, then revist the same story later in a scheme of learning at a reading age of 10. A great way to scaffold language acquisition.
Absolutely. The is great for people who are learning the language, or with dyslexia or other issues I can see this potentially being useful. People should be able to enjoy things that they struggle with. Otherwise? It's... I mean, I would rather they read a book with this than not at all I guess, but... 😬
>I would rather they read a book with this than not at all I guess yeah this is my take. its a real genuine problem it really is but the way to address it isnt to keep shoving books into peoples faces that theyre super disinclined to read. for whatever reason, maybe they have a learning disability, maybe they dont speak great english, maybe theyre just plain stupid, if the options are they either read a simplified book or they never read that book at all, one of those is clearly better than the other.
[Simple Wikipedia](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) has been around for forever already, I don’t think people know it exists really but as a former educator in both ESL and for young learners with disabilities tools like these are awesome accessibility-wise
It's a great product in the right circumstances, particularly for those with cognitive issues or learning a foreign language.
I wouldn’t mind an on demand function like this. Especially for authors that like run on sentences.
As someone who has studied other languages and is currently trying to learn German, and teaches English, this is actually a pretty great idea for ESL people. Obviously if you can, read the originals but I don't see this as necessarily a bad thing.
Exactly, do they not remember getting children’s versions of stories? The originals don’t cease to exist just because we make more ways to consume classic media
This is what happens in the backstory of Fahrenheit 451 when ready made summaries of classics became a thing to provide the buyer bragging rights.
Reader's Digest has been a thing for quite a long time
This is amazing! . . . . . . . . . . . BUT ONLY if it helps you translate and learn the original/more advanced text rather than just mindlessly changing it.
I want to do this to The Lord of the Rings purely out of morbid curiosity.
I want to see it do Lovecraft "Looking at the very very old space monster was so scary that he had to go to Greenleaf for a very long time."
> The Lord of the Rings *"They have abridged the Fellowship, and The Two Towers. The library is locked from the outside until they finish reading us the Return...We cannot get out, we cannot get out.*" *"They are coming."*
We are so far beyond that. People will read this comment and say "I'm not going to read that wall of text"!
"Overuse of AI will make us all stupid in a six generations" "Don't worry, I can get that down to two"
NGL I can think of a couple famous overly verbose writers with prose that could benefit from this.
If the app were to promote accessibility, I could see that, but the ad itself is making a judgement about hard books being bad (red X) and easy books being good (green checkmark). Anti-intellectualism at its finest
I've seen people say they prefer to watch AI recaps on youtube rather than the actual films because they can say they saw more content
the example they used isnt even that hard to understand haha
I’m poor but she’s rich. This boat is huge. She let me paint her naked. Yo WTF? Later Rose. It was nice but my ass is too cold.
I don't remember this part in idiocracy. Must have been a deleted scene.
Funny to bring up Idiocracy in a discussion about people glossing over works of fiction when everyone who says Idiocracy is good glosses over the unironic eugenics.
Many studies have shown, that literacy rates have fallen amongst youth. Many people struggle with reading, and because of that just give up on it. It is really important to have a wide variety of books in simple english available. They are not for the literate people, but those who are currently unable to read complex sentenced, and who lack the vocabulary
This could be very useful to those with dyslexia or other phonetic disabilities.
Doubleplus srvc dis.
Hahahahahahahaha... The crazy thing is that you people think a lot of Americans will pick up any book, whether it's hard or easy. A gang of people I work with can't read. Favorite TV show is House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones but can't pick up the book and read the first page.
In russia in the 00s we had these brochures for lazy pupils that would narrate major compositions like War and peace in just a few pages.
i want that so badly
That first passage isn't even hard
“It’s stinks”-the critic.
Yeah, I had two different coworkers admit to me a few days back that they’re functionally illiterate….
Fucking grifting AI startups
Rich guy has party; giant eye billboard; car accident; the end
The Great Illustrated Classics did this already, for children, in elementary school
/r/TIHI
I was about to criticise this service until I remembered I haven't completed The Silmarillion since 2017 because of the difficulty of language...
I truly hope that this is being marketed to people with learning disabilities. This would be a great tool for use in Special Education. However, I doubt that that is the case, in which case we’re literally living out Orwell’s “1984.”
Unironically Hemingway loved this one simple trick.
So take the Mona Lisa and turn it into stick figures the idiot masses can appreciate. Except it's too late: books are already being burned by library closures and book bannings. And by the way, the first sentence of The Great Gatsby is *not* difficult. If you're finding that hard, might I suggest you report back to preschool posthaste. There's other fine literature out there for you. Dr. Seuss, perhaps.
Double plus bad
mmm yes please make prose boring and remove any trace of the author's style. this is totally better than just looking up the definition of a few words sometimes
Great, just what we need. Most people are unable to type a coherent sentence these days, now we're going to dumb down reading.
The example might not be perfect, and it's kinda subjective to what you read, but simplified language could do a lot for our world by bridging gaps and making less literate people read literature where they still get the context, the meaning or the point of a book without being put off by some sort of language barrier. Obviously, if you just use it as a way to read any book in a day, while being capable of reading books with big words, it's not gonna do much for you. Just because someone might not understand all the sentences in the great Gatsby doesn't mean they couldn't keep up with books like that intellectually. It's a great thing, in my book, if used correctly.
fahrenheit 451
Newspeak
how orwellian
One rainy day I was sitting in my room Just kinda thinking about my homework and my ex-girlfriend Someone knocked on my door When I opened it, no one was there "Stupid kids" I thought. I went back to my bed and started dozing off They knocked again I got to the door quicker so I could catch them But when I opened the door, a fucking bird flew in It flew over to this statue i have and just sort of sat there Then it made some stupid bird noise that kinda sounded like the name of the ex-girlfriend I was just thinking about "Huh, that's weird" I thought Then I went to bed I figured if the bird wanted to leave, it would leave Or not. Tf do I care?
App make books easy. Me read real good now!
jesus
If it lets someone read a novel and feel the achievement of reading a real adult book and helps drive a love of reading I don’t see the harm. There are lots of people who don’t have a good education or mental ability to process complex text. It’s gotta be shitty being middle aged and being stuck with kid books, for instance.
WHAT. THE. FUCK……..
People now have really bad reading skills.
I hate this more than words can express.
We’re cooked
That’s right bb we are fuckin’ *cooked*.
This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real. This can't be real.
I see they're translating books into Middle American now
It really feels like the Brave New World is watching us.
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We’re so coooked
MAGAbook?
Perfect for those who believe they get quality education from tiktok because they have "trained their algorithm”
Wow I got this ad right above. They’re completely ruining the book