[jalisco555]

Like most high school students I had these books inflicted on me and I've yet to forgive my teachers.

[sharktrager]

I shared Caulfield's contempt for "phonies" as well as his sense of being different and his loneliness, but he seemed to me just about as phony as those he criticized as well as an unregenerate whiner and egotist. It was easy enough to identify with his adolescent angst, but his puerile attitudinizing was something else altogether.

I have always felt Salinger was well aware that Caulfield was not much, if at all, better than those he so disdained. When I read the book I actually felt that was what made it worthwhile.

That said, Old Man and the Sea is truly Hemingway's worst work, and I am a huge fan of his writing. The awards were "Lifetime Achievement Awards" because his early work had been too masculine for the literary elite. I angered my honors English teacher when she assigned it because I told her it would make much more sense to read something he had written that was actually readable.

[sharktrager]

I would also like to add that I think Moby Dick is not only an abuse of the English language, I believe it is truly the worst book I was ever forced to read. Melville writes as if he got a good deal on adjectives and had to use them all up.

[O.C. - Old Cracker]

I'd toss 'Catcher in the Rye' on to the same bonfire with such modern entertainment as 'South Park'. Same genre of garbage.

[Tax-chick]

I've never read "The Catcher in the Rye," and, now that I've read the brief excerpts in this review, you may be sure this won't be one of the "neglected classics" I pick off the library shelf! YUCK!

[Elephino]

Jeesh, I loved "Catcher in the Rye". I've read it 4 or 5 times and have gotten something new out of it with every reading. Sure, Salinger is no William Faulkner, but then again, who is?

[Melas]

I guess I don't get it. I loved those books.

[SamAdams76]

There is actually a great body of American and English literature out there (I lump the two together). Pity that the schools keep pushing the worst ones on students - turning many of them off to reading forever. I found it difficult to slog through Catcher In The Rye also and I will forever associate the book with the loser that shot John Lennon.

Some of my favorite English literature is Lord Of The Flies by William Goulding and just about everything by J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Dickens. Some of my favorite American literature was written by John Updike, Jack London and Mark Twain. I say, bring back Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to our schools! Of course, the politically correct teacher's unions will have nothing to do with that.

[monkey]

The entire pop culture has become Holden. Remeber when banana fish were considered a rare delicacy?

[Boiler Plate]

Catcher in the Rye was quite simply a yawner and a waste of time.

[Fiddlstix]

J.D. Salinger should have restricted his writing to sh*t house walls. That's where it belonged in the first place.

[two23]

"Like most high school students I had these books inflicted on me and I've yet to forgive my teachers.

Our teacher made us read a WHOLE collection of Salinger stories: it was absolutely mind numbing rot. Also on our high school literary agenda was "Black Like Me" (guilt), "The Pearl" (if you ever strike it rich, it'll make you greedy and your life will turn to tragedy etc). And a collection of Edgar A. Poe (by the way, drugs are bad).

[Old Professer]

I don't really know Yardley but I instinctively dislike him immensely; all this fuss about a boy (Holden - can you imagine, "Holden?") who can't even get a decent erection without blushing while, since his posturing and rambling and senseless dissembling Portnoy nearly matched the Apollo Missions' accomplishments on his bedroom ceiling (and failed only because of the limitations of gravity and his parents love of Victorian architecture) we're still to imagine that spermatamoza and Salmon share a common destiny?

[Old Professer]

The mighty heavens have smote me; I failed the spell check test.

Spermatozoa.

[Old Professer]

Why is Holden Caulfield nearly universally seen as "a symbol of purity and sensitivity" (as "The Oxford Companion to American Literature" puts it) when he's merely self-regarding and callow?

I would submit it might well be because it was the first book printed in about the fifty years preceding it that made the word "callow" a household term; I believe the author of this piece cleverly salted this peppery trail with this tidbit to see who suffered to the end of this tiresome and dreary cage-liner.

I have a love of the written word, the turn of a deft phrase, the excitement of being struck blindside by the twist upon the unsuspecting tongue but I do not parade in public my naked desperation to chase a long-departed train.

[Matt32]

Ah, what an interesting topic. I first read Catcher all of three years ago in my sophomore year of high school. I remember being struck most by the whole concept of this teenager completely slipping out of his environment, his role as a student at some private boarding school, and heading over to New York City to wander around for a while as if it were a "vacation." Admittedly I was at first sympathetic, even taken, with Holden's whole "philosophy" of criticizing every "phony" he came into contact with (although I do remember him being a gentleman to a group of nuns at one point, or something to that effect). But in some of the retrospective looks I've taken since maturing, I'd hope, over the years, I think it's pretty clear that Holden was intended as a look at the hypocrisy of adolescents. All the angst and projection is meant to be seen as a phase of sorts, one brought on by the transition from a childish outlook to a mature one on the world. Unfortunately too many people - including more adults than you'd expect - seem to ignore this and see Holden as some sort of brave dissenter decrying the hypocrisies of society, etc. I hold, conceding to not know much about the author, that it was Salinger's intention for Holden to be the most hypocritical of all. But, hey, I thought it was a good enough book, just that people take the wrong message and run away with it.

And yeah, take my word for it as I just left the public high school system behind, there is definitely some sort of concerted effort, literariture-wise, to canonize crap. Don't get me wrong, some of the required reading was good - Golding's Lord of the Flies, Huxley's Brave New World, O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods (a novel about a mentally disturbed Vietnam vet who runs for political office but loses in a landslide when it's revealed that he took part in the My Lai massacre... hmm... if only), Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, both of which were a lot better than I ever expected, and some others. But then there were some real stinkers too. Most notably Chopin's The Awakening, Morrison's The Bluest Eye, and The Bad Seed, the author of which I can't bother to remember. Also noteworthy was A Prayer for Owen Meany which, while pretty good at times, kept having the narrative jump into the future at random intervals so the protagonist could whine for 3-4 pages about how much he hated Ronald Reagan, all completely out of context. Pretty poor writing. There was also a list of books to choose from for summer reading one year, and every single book on the list, no matter which you picked, revolved entirely around the theme of how miserable life in America is for minorities. Smells like PC agenda...

And that's about a wrap. No Hemingway, no Mark Twain, not even Tolkien. I found it much more useful to circumvent the high school "canon" and read some things on my own. I'd be willing to wager I've gotten more out of Burgess's Clockwork Orange, the "mature" writings of C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity, Screwtape Letters, Till We Have Faces), Homer's Odyssey, and Plato and Aristotle than I had in four years of high school required reading. They weren't all stinkers, but there was definitely the presence of a PC/liberal-driven agenda.