Here’s my guilty confession of the day: I’ve never read “Catcher In The Rye”. My high school’s American literature syllabus was strictly 19th century except for “The Great Gatsby” (not even a little Hemingway!), and my personal reading inclinations as a teenager were more towards genre fiction than literary fiction. Plus, I wasn’t the rebellious, angsty, struggling teenage type, so I wouldn’t have been drawn to that sort of book organically. As I headed off to college, my reading shifted to non-fiction, where it has remained ever since, with only the occasional dip into reading a popular novel here and there, but never any genuine attempt to make up for my lack of literary depth. At middle-age, I occasionally have a pang of intellectual remorse for not being better read in literature, but it doesn’t ring very deeply. No one could ever accuse me of not being a reader, I was just never set on fire by made-up stories, no matter how gorgeous the writing.
Sorry, J.D.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
I read CITR when I was about 9, when my high-school aged sister finished reading it for a class. I loved it … but realized when I reread it in my 20′s that I hadn’t understood it very well at all. There are a lot of the so-called classics that I was never required to read for school, so if I didn’t pick it up myself I never did read most of them. It pains me to realize how poorly read I am in some of those ways, but like you, no one has ever accused me of not being a reader.
I read it when I was 19 too…for some lit class. I didn’t like it one bit…thought it was too angsty and self-indulgent. At the time I remember thinking JD Salinger is certainly no Robert Heinlein. Now that I’m old, I might try it again…but I am a bit more intrigued by his short stories.