Catcher in the Rye

[hedgehog]

[rcrush]

1. Never read it

Was never assigned to us in high school so I never really knew anything about it.

[trof]

2. Neither choice, I guess.

I read it while I was in college in the early 60s.
Just because I'd heard so much about it, not assigned in any course.
At the time I thought it was really radical.
Now?
meh

[alphafemale]

3. It's an amazing representation of a young teen

But if someone were still that self-centered at 30 or 40 it would be a mental health issue

[Aristus]

4. He was already a mental health issue. Remember?

Anyway, Catcher In The Rye is one of the classics that I read in one sitting. I was hooked...

[lunatica]

5. I loved it

I was in high school in the South in the late 1960s and my English teacher let me read it and write a book report on it. She told me she normally wouldn't allow it, but she trusted me to be mature about it. That made me feel very good.

[Cant trust em]

6. I love this book.

I also recommend a book called "King Dork". It sort of follows Catcher while parodying it.

[Iggo]

7. We were assigned The Outsiders instead.

[hedgehog]

10. Am I the only teenager who wasn't overwhelmed with angst?

'course, I was dealing with chronic depression and mild asperger's, so who had time for angst?

:yoiks:


On edit: coming from the working class, I didn't connect with Holden at all!

[hunter]

21. I never figured Catcher in the Rye out either.

A Confederacy of Dunces is the same book really, but an entire meal and not just American cheese on white bread.

But then again, I never figure out a whole lot of books, even though I'll read things like that because someone says I should. I can't even make it through a Harry Potter book. Aspergers? Maybe.

My own teenage anguish was trying to make it through each day of high school without getting harassed by bullies or into trouble with my teachers. Mostly I did that by being as invisible as I could. I survived two hellish years of ordinary high school teenager-hood and this was quite enough so I skipped onto college. I was sort of a feral kid without words in my head. People were random and sometimes cruel so I focused my attention on other things.

[wickerwoman]

31. That must be it.

I read Catcher in the Rye in college while working two jobs to buy books and food and my main reaction was "Jesus, kid, get a grip!" A few days in the house I grew up in would have put most of his problems into perspective. "Phoneys" were the least of our problems!

I'm planning to give it another go one of these days, but I suspect it's one of those books that has a very small window of relatability and if you don't read it at exactly the right time in your life, you're just never going to get it.

[tigereye]

44. I wasn't an angst ridden teen (maybe some bf worries)

I was too busy and goal-oriented, I think. I didn't get all existential til college and then punk rock refocused that! :rofl:

[msanthrope]

25. I read both. Catcher was better. n/t

[Iggo]

30. My older sister (a year ahead of me in school) swore by Catcher...

...In The Rye.

But she threw it at me with Camus, Kafka, Nietzche, etc., and it was all really too much for me at the time (12, 13 yrs old maybe). But I know she meant well. I know because she teaches 2nd grade now and smiles all the time.

[tigereye]

45. oh my, young teens and Camus and Kafka...

I didn't read those til college... and throw in some Kierkegaard :D

[Iggo]

50. Yeah, completely over my head.

Sis was quite advanced for her years.

[KG]

8. i just didn't 'get' it.

as a somewhat well-adjusted working class teenager, i couldn't understood the angst of a white, well-to-do kid.

[WolverineDG]

9. That book blows chunks

yes I read it. twice. once in college & once again 20 years later to see if my opinion of it had changed. Nope. still sucked.

and I'm still pissed that Holden didn't shoot himself.

dg

[av8rdave]

11. Neither

Strange book, but once I read it, I was never able to forget about it.

That, IMO, is the mark of a great book.

[texanwitch]

12. I just didn't get the book either.

When I read it I thought grow up kid.

I had to grow up quick, at 13 I was pretty much on my own.

I didn't feel sorry for myself.

The book didn't impress me.

[LibDemAlways]

13. My daughter read it last year in 10th grade and loved it. She

identified with Holden's dislike of all the "phonies" - something she can totally relate to. I think a teenager's like or dislike of the book says a lot about that kid's social status in high school. Those who see themselves as outsiders, rebels, or rejects are much more likely to like it than those who are conformists and/or popular and can't understand what Holden's bitching about.

[Zomby Woof]

19. Another weak grasping at straws

I was definitely outside the meainstream in high school - during the preppie/Izod shirt/New Wave segment of the 80's. When other guys has spiked short hair and thin ties, I had long hair and wore t-shirts (stereotyped as one of the 'stoners', I suppose, but I didn't hang out with them either). I despised plastic people then, and now, and yet never identified with Caufield. Grew up lower middle class, and my parents didn't even have a mortgage until I was almost in high school - and I was the youngest. I just have a built-in contempt for emo/whiny types.

He was just the flip side of the same coin - a spoiled and whiny prick.

[LibDemAlways]

24. I didn't pay much attention to Holden's socioeconomic status. I just

enjoyed his dead-on insights into human nature - like his description of the phony headmaster who gladhanded the good looking parents while ignoring the fat unattractive parents. (I've seen that one in action). I just think that Salinger was using Holden as a vehicle to criticize a lot of the hypocritical shit he had witnessed growing up in a similar environment.

[tigereye]

46. good point - a lot of really good social class assessment, in a way

from what I was reading Salinger experienced both working middle and upper-class worlds- dad was a son of a rabbi, and dad had a pork and ham! selling business. Mother was Irish, and eventually they moved to the Upper West Side.

[Brickbat]

14. I always figured that people who thought Holden Caulfield was a whiny prick

didn't see themselves in him.

[LibDemAlways]

15. I have a slightly different take. I think people who thought

Holden was a whiny prick didn't see themselves in the people he was griping about.

[Brickbat]

17. That too!

And I didn't mean I thought that Holden was a whiny prick. I just thought he expressed things that most adolescents feel at some point, but just don't trust ourselves to recognize it in someone else.

[Zomby Woof]

18. I didn't like him or the people he bitched about

I think it's a false choice.

[stray cat]

39. Probably true - he was easier to identify with if you were big on whining and low on responsibility

[kedrys]

16. Other: Never read it

Not really interested in finding out what the fuss is all about either. :shrug:

[tigereye]

47. Salinger had a great ear for dialogue, if you are interested in that kind of

thing...

[Taverner]

20. 3rd option - Was a good book - and it would be nice to see that secret vault someday

[hunter]

27. You'll sooner see photos of Paul Harvey blowing a horse.

When J. Edgar Hoover told J. D. Salinger to jump, I imagine he did while asking "What color dress shall I wear?"

That "secret vault" of yours will probably be inaccessible for a long, long time.

[Taverner]

29. Didn't know there was a J Edgar connection

What's the back story on that?

[murielm99]

34. They were both born on January 1st?

I didn't know there was any other connection.

[Quantess]

22. It's all about the teen angst!

(Or young person angst, depending on how old Holden Caufield was, I can't remember).

I read it at age 21 or so, voluntarily. I really identified with his bitterness and quiet rebellion.

[Captain Hilts]

23. It never interested me, actually. nt

[bigwillq]

26. Hated it

Didn't like Holden. Thought he was a whiny brat. Book did nothing for me.

[LostInAnomie]

28. Read it when I was around 24.

All I could think was "God, I wish life was that simple again."

[proteus_lives]

32. Loved it.

A classic that lived up to the claim.

[Kat45]

33. We read it in junior high, but I had already read it on my own.

It was probably the only book we read in school that I loved; most of them, I didn't even like. I should read it again.

[jobycom]

35. It didn't get me through high school, but it had a huge impact on my ideas of literature.

My liberal aunt left it on my dresser after one of her rare visits, and I read it. I had never heard of it--it was probably banned at my school, now that I think about it. I was an avid reader and aspiring writer and was looking for something beyond the formal style of writing I'd grown up on.

The book was written the way I imagined writing a book, and while it didn't really echo my life or thoughts, it did catch a lot of the way I thought about things at the time. It was a major influence on my life, in a lot of ways.

It's a great book. When I see someone trashing it, I just assume they don't understand it. Probably some who hate do understand it, but not most.

[tigereye]

49. I think the "voice" was not one often heard at the time

I often think of Roth and Updike when I think of Salinger- interesting generation of writers.

[Zavulon]

36. Forced reading for me in Grade 10.

Hated it then, but read it again a few years ago and got yet another indication of what an idiot I was as a teen.

[velvet]

37. loved it

I read it round age 16, it was the first novel I'd read that was written in a vernacular rather than a formal style, which was something of a revelation to me. It had a poignancy peculiarly American that I also found in Steinbeck's "Cannery Row" which I read not long after. It turned me on to American literature.

[stray cat]

38. He seemed like a spoiled whiner

[unpossibles]

40. overrated

And I don't say that lightly.

[Courtesy Flush]

41. I read it when I was in my forties

Whining teenagers have a different effect on you by that age. Teen angst is just another way of being phony.

[hedgehog]

42. Irish Catholic here, with family from Youngstown, Cleveland and Oil City

so you can get a feel for my background. To this day I can't figure out whether Holden was actually clinically depressed or pioneering emo.

I had a college course on James Joyce's Ulysses. I enjoyed being shown all the cross connections and allusions. IIRC, Stephen Daedalus's mother on her deathbed begged him to return to the Church, and he refused, allowing her to die in anguish thinking he was damned. He then wanders through Dublin feeling sorry for himself for living in society that makes him feel guilty about that. Oh, please! Your sensibilities are so fine that you can't pretend to believe a few minutes to allow your mother to die in Peace? Then cowboy up and take responsibility for your actions!

It's a good book mind you, but I think Joyce and his alter ego were both too full of themselves. Since I know people like that in real life, it doesn't impress me.

[tigereye]

43. great writing, great writer, wonderful dialogue - ground-breaking perspective

at the time.

[bikebloke]

48. It was a good read.

But it didn't blow me away or change my life. I read it while working on a kibbutz. Exploring an abandoned roofless building, I discovered a box of english language books. A treasure. Catcher in the Rye was one of them.

Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. Now that book wowed me in high school.

[tigereye]

51. what a great thing to find a box of books and check them out.

reminds me of books about finding forbidden Western classics in China during the Cultural Revolution. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress... Read the book, but missed the film.


http://www.reelviews.net/movies/b/balzac_seamstress.html



I thought more about Catcher when I took my son to a Banned Books reading here a few years back, and a friend of mine was reading some Orwell. It really made me think about why books get banned, and I think Catcher and other banned, groundbreaking works deserve respect for the amount of bannings they receive as well as their literary status and content, in the sense that books that challenge us open up a way of expression/thinking/writing that alarms some people. And I really don't think that books should be banned simply for that reason.

Food for thought, I guess. :D

[deutsey]

52. It wasn't the only thing that got me through high school, but I liked it

Slaughterhouse-5 was much more of a transformative book for me when I read it at 15.

Others I read in high school included: The Outsiders; That Was Then, This is Now; Catch-22, The Stand.