"I first read The Great Gatsby at 16 in an English class taught by the most intriguing teacher at our small town high school. Hed just come back from years teaching in Japan, he smoked (unheard of in California in the 1990s) and kept a bowl of wasabi peas (also unheard of in California in the1990s) on his desk. We talked a lot about the meaning of the colour yellow in the book, prohibition versus the current war on drugs and the morality of Nick as a narrator. It all felt impossibly sophisticated. More years later than I care to count, wasabi peas are far too commonplace to stir up any feeling of the exotic but I can still get lost in the glamour of Gatsby.
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