Posted on 01/29/2010 5:05:02 PM PST by DogByte6RER
(Excerpt) Read more at signonsandiego.com ...
Swift’s satire takes some background to fully appreciate — background that comes with age and/or experience.
Salinger’s works don’t require that kind of background. You either like the story and get an emotional massage from angst or you don’t.
Deponds on your definition of prose.
I like many others was forced to read it 50 years ago. I read it again last year. It’s fothright crap.
Sleeping would be more beneficial than reading his nonsense.
Yeah that’s why it has continual appeal to one generastion after the next. There’s a lot of thematic strands going on nd they’re put across via an unreliable narrator. It’s amazing how people can just summarily dismiss something. A while back I got into an argument with another poster who claimed James Joyce was essentially a fraudulent hack.
For what it's worth, I tried to read Ivanhoe 4 times, at 4 different times of life. It just never "took" with me. And I love great books.
I've read it about 4 times and its never knocked me down as overly brilliant but I still enjoy the prose, however Salinger's "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" is one of my favorite reads and has a prominent place on my "emergency book" bookshelf.
(When I can find nothing new to read I choose something from my "emergency book" bookshelf...)
He was often overtly Christian in his fiction. CITR pops up on lists of All Time Favorite Conservative Novels.
He was not alone in that. It was a movement. The modern short story was structured by many writers all adding and taking away pieces of straw and mortar.
Subtlety, nuance, and paradox are all part of the modern formula.
As I said, he was a good writer. To me (as a professional and creative writer), what you define is a good writer, but not a great one (as Melville, McCarthy, Wolfe, and, yes, I hate to admit, Hemingway, too).
If people like him, fine. I would never try to take that away. I just don’t like the way several groups rise up as soon as a writer dies and (usually with an ulterior motive) start declaring him/her “One of the top 5 American authors.”
Come to think of it you’ve probably never read a word of his.
That’s what you call it? I read a boring book about a whining spoiled brat little rich prick who liked to hit on older women, get drunk and make an idiot out of himself.
LOL, I guess that my extreme lower income, foster homes and juvenile hall childhood left me under-equipped to deal with that guy’s profound angst.
I wanted to kick his a$$ and make him join the Army.
LOL!
Anything in it that would make you want to shoot a rock star?
LOL!!!!
Holden Caulfield is now running the country. Even given the passing of his creator, it’s unfortunate for conservatives to be celebrating him.
The devil you say.
They aren’t celebrating him anymore than people who like the play Macbeth are celebrating the title character.
J.D. Salinger was okay, pretty good, not great.
I read it so long ago I don’t remember much about it but I know I didn’t hate it as badly as I hated the movie “Raging Bull” that was supposed to be such a masterpiece. I thought it was more like raging Bullshit. I would call it one of the WORST movies ever made. If I had to drink Starbucks coffee and watch “Raging Bull” at the same time it would be a death sentence.
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