<p>Yesterday I decided to commit myself to two-hour daily reading to prepare for the MCAT verbal and to improve my verbal ability in general. I’m a freshman by the way.
My first choice novel was Great Gatsby.
I set out to read for an hour, but ridiculously, I spent the whole hour reading only two pages.
The main reason of this would be that there were some weird phrases and sentences I could not understand.
I understand all the vocabularies and grammar making up the phrases and sentences, but I just can’t figure out what they mean as a whole.</p>
<p>What troubled me are the following: </p>
<li>"…the victim of not a few veteran bores"
I know the meanings of the words, veteran and bore, but how can one become the victim of a veteran bore? This just doesn’t make sense.</li>
<li>“The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secrect griefs of wild, unknown men.”
What is the abnormal mind being referred to?</li>
<li>“Most of the confidences were unsought-frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marrered by obvious suppresions.”
I have absolutely no clue about this one.</li>
<li>"…it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men"
What’s with the phrases like “abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men”?</li>
</ol>
<p>I considered just skipping those weirdos and moving on, but I got worried that if I don’t get those phrases, then I’ll have trouble understanding what comes later in the novel. My assumption is that every single thing, no matter how small, builds up to the overall story, and that missing any part of them will adversly affect understanding the novel. What should I do to be able to understand those kinds of weird phrases? I’m guessing the novel has more of those phrases as the novel proceeds. What should I do? I’m really frustrated. </p>
<p>One more thing I forgot to mention: When I read literary works and come across words I don’t know, I first try to guess the meaning of words by looking at the context. But most of the time, especially when reading very high-level, abstruse novels like Moby Dick and Decameron, this method fails and leaves me with an uncomfortable and irritable feeling, forcing me to look up all those words in the dictionary. But then, as I flip through the dictionary to learn new words, an hour goes by in a second; I end up reading only one or three pages in an hour, not covering the novel as much as I wanted to. What could be the solution to this?
Thanks.</p>
<p>MCAT verbal is not like SAT or ACT verbal reasoning. There are going to be passages where you read it and say to yourself “what did I just read!!!”. Sometimes the questions can be answered with good reasoning, but not always. A lot of the questions will focus on the main theme, pick the statement that would weaken the author’s main point, etc… As far as starting this early, I would focus more on reading journal articles or newspapers than fiction. The passages usually take 3-4 minutes to read and that leaves you with 4-5 minutes to answer ~6 questions. So practice on your ability to read quickly as well as being able to grab the main concepts of a passage.</p>
<p>“My assumption is that every single thing, no matter how small, builds up to the overall story, and that missing any part of them will adversly affect understanding the novel.”</p>
<p>You are going to have to drop this assumption if you want to do well on the MCAT. You won’t understand most of the things in a MCAT verbal passage. You probably won’t even know the definitions to all the words. You only have time to read to get the gist of what the author is saying (and sometimes not even that). </p>
<p>Since there is no fiction on the MCAT, you should be reading stuff like the Economist.</p>
<p>You are REALLY going to have to drop that assumption. Very frequently, the MCAT will actually remove paragraphs and sentences in the passage to make it more difficult to understand.</p>
<p>I took the Kaplan course for the MCAT, and one of the recommendations was to read magazines like the Economist to get into “MCAT verbal mode.” There’s no denying that The Great Gatsby is seminal American literature, but the MCAT doesn’t give a dang about that.</p>