7 ms·

I will probably burn all my virtual karma, but I just need to say this: I hated Catcher in the Rye with a passion. I used to do a lot of reading, still do my fa

by gonzus 8y ago

I will probably burn all my virtual karma, but I just need to say this: I hated Catcher in the Rye with a passion. I used to do a lot of reading, still do my fair share, but just could not stand that book.

germinalphrase 8y ago
I’m a high school English teacher, and I’ve never liked it. Didn’t like it in high school; don’t care for it now (and don’t teach it).
- GCA10 8y ago
  Thank you!
mrspeaker 8y ago
Probably could burn less virtual karma if you made your comment more interesting by saying WHY you hated it. The plot? The characters? The typesetting? The pages gave you paper-cuts? Tell us Why!
- gonzus 8y ago
  You are right, I was just ranting... As others have already mentioned, I think the best summary is "Holden Caulfield is full of shit". I hated his whiny attitude throughout the whole book, and I did not feel any sense of closure at the end.
  - gweinberg 8y ago
    I felt he was full of shit also but since I was just reading for pleasure instead of being assigned the book, I stopped really early.
j1vms 8y ago
Not a big fan of it either, though it's important to recognize that given the era it was released (early 1950s), it was quite ahead of its time. Perhaps ahead by at least 2 decades in anticipating American youth's punk culture, that we see from the mid-70s onward. As a side note, you might give his later Franny and Zooey (1961) a try, finding a more nuanced Salinger at work.
lordnacho 8y ago
This is the most common reaction I've heard over the years to that book. Perhaps because it's jammed down everyone's throats in high school English classes. Perhaps it's the coming of age book of a certain generation, which feels wrong to the next that takes all its observations for granted. I didn't get it either, why this book is so beloved of literature teachers.
mushufasa 8y ago
My high school english teacher, wonderful woman, always said that Holden was "just stupid." Not in a way to devalue the literature, but as a character trait. I actually really liked that analysis. The way forward for Holden is to get over himself and stop wallowing in his past. (Spoiler: he doesn't). She really cut to the chase, in a way a lot of teenagers probably need to hear.
- StrictDabbler 8y ago
  This is accurate. Holden Caufield is full of shit. He's a classic unreliable narrator, in a formal sense, but also in a deeper cultural one. Every year hundreds of thousands of students are put off from this book by how much they dislike Caulfield. Too few of their teachers tell them "that's exactly the point, he's got his head up his ass but he's absolutely sure he's right about everything. One page he thinks X and he's contemptuous of all disagreement but ten pages later he's totally convinced of Not X. That's how most adults think of their teenage selves. Reflect on this." People talk about it as a coming-of-age book, and in a sense it is, but it's a lot less like American Graffiti and a lot more like American Psycho.
  - MisterOctober 8y ago
    ^ best one-sentence summation of this book I've ever seen. "Catcher" and "This Side of Paradise" are kind of a binary system for studying the pathology of American youth culture.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      Admittedly didn’t read This Side of Paradise until grad school. But I definitely am much more of a Fitzgerald and Hemingway person and have zero desire to revisit Salinger.
aphextron 8y ago
> I will probably burn all my virtual karma, but I just need to say this: I hated Catcher in the Rye with a passion. I used to do a lot of reading, still do my fair share, but just could not stand that book. There's a very short window in which one can read Catcher for the first time and still enjoy it. It's that 3 year window between 13ish and 16 where you've just begun having all these angsty thoughts about the world, yet have no context or understanding for them. Outside of that, it just comes off as a whiny entitled kid doing nothing. But within that context, it's a seminal coming of age story. I can distinctly remember the ending being the first work of art to move me to tears.
- wolco 8y ago
  I read at 19 loved the book but loved franny and zooey more. Something may have been lost by that age.
- scottlocklin 8y ago
  I read it in that era of my life, and I still disliked it more or less because it was a whiny entitled kid doing nothing! It really seemed like a canned Madison Avenue product designed to appeal to teenagers. Come to think if it, the only things I remembered enjoying in my forced high school reading was Macbeth and Tale of Two Cities. One thing I did really like from that era which I suspect wouldn't age well if I tried it now for the first time was Dune.
  - ci5er 8y ago
    Try it. It ages better than Ender's Game.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >it was a whiny entitled kid doing nothing! The "doing nothing" part can be found in tons of great literature and movies. Most of us, throughout most of our lives and days, "do nothing" as well... Not everything has to have a trite Pixar/Heroes Journey like arc.
- darkerside 8y ago
DanBC 8y ago
One of the problems is that it seems to have created a trope of "young genius author creates a single amazing work and is troubled" which is used in some dire films. Ruby Sparks, The Vanishing of Sidney Hall, Chasing Holden, there's a bunch of them and they suck. https://www.indiewire.com/2017/01/sidney-hall-review-sundance-logan-lerman-1201773905/ https://www.indiewire.com/2017/01/sidney-hall-review-sundanc...
pjm331 8y ago
I wonder if you would change your mind if you thought about the fact that Holden wasn’t just an angsts teen but a victim of sexual abuse? IMO that changes the whole read
- gonzus 8y ago
  Was this stated / implied in Catcher in the Rye (I honestly don't remember), in some other work by Salinger, or is it the result of one of those works of psychological analysis that purport to tell us what really goes on in a novel?
madrox 8y ago
I will probably go down in flames with you, because I felt the same, though I liked his other works like Franny & Zooey. Catcher was full of slang that I simply couldn't relate to. For me, it wasn't that different from reading Shakespeare in high school...focusing on interpreting the language got in the way of my ability to empathize.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  Franny & Zooey... meh. The characters are cardboard cutouts, not people. I couldn't relate to them at all. You can't imagine wanting to have a conversation with any of them.
bowlich 8y ago
Not a fan either, but I also didn't read it until I was over 30 and couldn't stomach the narrator. I think most of my friends who recommended it had read it when they were teenagers not as adults.
amazingman 8y ago
For anyone who just can’t connect to this book, or doesn’t “get” it, maybe this quote will help. I read the book as a kid and liked it, but when I reread it as an adult this passage stopped me dead in my tracks and I cried; damn near sobbed. In my view, it’s the very center of the entire narrative. > My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. He was left-handed. The thing that was descriptive about it, though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up at bat. He's dead now. He got leukemia and died when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. You'd have liked him. He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent. He was terrifically intelligent. His teachers were always writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a boy like Allie in their class. And they weren't just shooting the crap. They really meant it. But it wasn't just that he was the most intelligent member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never got mad at anybody. People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily, but Allie never did, and he had very red hair. I'll tell you what kind of red hair he had. I started playing golf when I was only ten years old. I remember once, the summer I was around twelve, teeing off and all, and having a hunch that if I turned around all of a sudden, I'd see Allie. So I did, and sure enough, he was sitting on his bike outside the fence--there was this fence that went all around the course--and he was sitting there, about a hundred and fifty yards behind me, watching me tee off. That's the kind of red hair he had. God, he was a nice kid, though. He used to laugh so hard at something he thought of at the dinner table that he just about fell off his chair. I was only thirteen, and they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage. I don't blame them. I really don't. I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn't do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it, and you didn't know Allie. My hand still hurts me once in a while when it rains and all, and I can't make a real fist any more-- not a tight one, I mean--but outside of that I don't care much. I mean I'm not going to be a goddam surgeon or a violinist or anything anyway.

by gonzus 8y ago

germinalphrase 8y ago

I’m a high school English teacher, and I’ve never liked it. Didn’t like it in high school; don’t care for it now (and don’t teach it).

GCA10 8y ago
Thank you!

mrspeaker 8y ago

Probably could burn less virtual karma if you made your comment more interesting by saying WHY you hated it. The plot? The characters? The typesetting? The pages gave you paper-cuts? Tell us Why!

gonzus 8y ago
You are right, I was just ranting... As others have already mentioned, I think the best summary is "Holden Caulfield is full of shit". I hated his whiny attitude throughout the whole book, and I did not feel any sense of closure at the end.
- gweinberg 8y ago
  I felt he was full of shit also but since I was just reading for pleasure instead of being assigned the book, I stopped really early.

j1vms 8y ago

Not a big fan of it either, though it's important to recognize that given the era it was released (early 1950s), it was quite ahead of its time. Perhaps ahead by at least 2 decades in anticipating American youth's punk culture, that we see from the mid-70s onward. As a side note, you might give his later Franny and Zooey (1961) a try, finding a more nuanced Salinger at work.

lordnacho 8y ago

This is the most common reaction I've heard over the years to that book. Perhaps because it's jammed down everyone's throats in high school English classes. Perhaps it's the coming of age book of a certain generation, which feels wrong to the next that takes all its observations for granted. I didn't get it either, why this book is so beloved of literature teachers.

mushufasa 8y ago

My high school english teacher, wonderful woman, always said that Holden was "just stupid." Not in a way to devalue the literature, but as a character trait. I actually really liked that analysis. The way forward for Holden is to get over himself and stop wallowing in his past. (Spoiler: he doesn't). She really cut to the chase, in a way a lot of teenagers probably need to hear.

StrictDabbler 8y ago
This is accurate. Holden Caufield is full of shit. He's a classic unreliable narrator, in a formal sense, but also in a deeper cultural one. Every year hundreds of thousands of students are put off from this book by how much they dislike Caulfield. Too few of their teachers tell them "that's exactly the point, he's got his head up his ass but he's absolutely sure he's right about everything. One page he thinks X and he's contemptuous of all disagreement but ten pages later he's totally convinced of Not X. That's how most adults think of their teenage selves. Reflect on this." People talk about it as a coming-of-age book, and in a sense it is, but it's a lot less like American Graffiti and a lot more like American Psycho.
- MisterOctober 8y ago
  ^ best one-sentence summation of this book I've ever seen. "Catcher" and "This Side of Paradise" are kind of a binary system for studying the pathology of American youth culture.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Admittedly didn’t read This Side of Paradise until grad school. But I definitely am much more of a Fitzgerald and Hemingway person and have zero desire to revisit Salinger.

aphextron 8y ago

> I will probably burn all my virtual karma, but I just need to say this: I hated Catcher in the Rye with a passion. I used to do a lot of reading, still do my fair share, but just could not stand that book. There's a very short window in which one can read Catcher for the first time and still enjoy it. It's that 3 year window between 13ish and 16 where you've just begun having all these angsty thoughts about the world, yet have no context or understanding for them. Outside of that, it just comes off as a whiny entitled kid doing nothing. But within that context, it's a seminal coming of age story. I can distinctly remember the ending being the first work of art to move me to tears.

wolco 8y ago
I read at 19 loved the book but loved franny and zooey more. Something may have been lost by that age.
scottlocklin 8y ago
I read it in that era of my life, and I still disliked it more or less because it was a whiny entitled kid doing nothing! It really seemed like a canned Madison Avenue product designed to appeal to teenagers. Come to think if it, the only things I remembered enjoying in my forced high school reading was Macbeth and Tale of Two Cities. One thing I did really like from that era which I suspect wouldn't age well if I tried it now for the first time was Dune.
- ci5er 8y ago
  Try it. It ages better than Ender's Game.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >it was a whiny entitled kid doing nothing! The "doing nothing" part can be found in tons of great literature and movies. Most of us, throughout most of our lives and days, "do nothing" as well... Not everything has to have a trite Pixar/Heroes Journey like arc.
darkerside 8y ago

DanBC 8y ago

One of the problems is that it seems to have created a trope of "young genius author creates a single amazing work and is troubled" which is used in some dire films. Ruby Sparks, The Vanishing of Sidney Hall, Chasing Holden, there's a bunch of them and they suck. https://www.indiewire.com/2017/01/sidney-hall-review-sundance-logan-lerman-1201773905/ https://www.indiewire.com/2017/01/sidney-hall-review-sundanc...

pjm331 8y ago

I wonder if you would change your mind if you thought about the fact that Holden wasn’t just an angsts teen but a victim of sexual abuse? IMO that changes the whole read

gonzus 8y ago
Was this stated / implied in Catcher in the Rye (I honestly don't remember), in some other work by Salinger, or is it the result of one of those works of psychological analysis that purport to tell us what really goes on in a novel?

madrox 8y ago

I will probably go down in flames with you, because I felt the same, though I liked his other works like Franny & Zooey. Catcher was full of slang that I simply couldn't relate to. For me, it wasn't that different from reading Shakespeare in high school...focusing on interpreting the language got in the way of my ability to empathize.

AnimalMuppet 8y ago
Franny & Zooey... meh. The characters are cardboard cutouts, not people. I couldn't relate to them at all. You can't imagine wanting to have a conversation with any of them.

bowlich 8y ago

Not a fan either, but I also didn't read it until I was over 30 and couldn't stomach the narrator. I think most of my friends who recommended it had read it when they were teenagers not as adults.

amazingman 8y ago

For anyone who just can’t connect to this book, or doesn’t “get” it, maybe this quote will help. I read the book as a kid and liked it, but when I reread it as an adult this passage stopped me dead in my tracks and I cried; damn near sobbed. In my view, it’s the very center of the entire narrative. > My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. He was left-handed. The thing that was descriptive about it, though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up at bat. He's dead now. He got leukemia and died when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. You'd have liked him. He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent. He was terrifically intelligent. His teachers were always writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a boy like Allie in their class. And they weren't just shooting the crap. They really meant it. But it wasn't just that he was the most intelligent member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never got mad at anybody. People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily, but Allie never did, and he had very red hair. I'll tell you what kind of red hair he had. I started playing golf when I was only ten years old. I remember once, the summer I was around twelve, teeing off and all, and having a hunch that if I turned around all of a sudden, I'd see Allie. So I did, and sure enough, he was sitting on his bike outside the fence--there was this fence that went all around the course--and he was sitting there, about a hundred and fifty yards behind me, watching me tee off. That's the kind of red hair he had. God, he was a nice kid, though. He used to laugh so hard at something he thought of at the dinner table that he just about fell off his chair. I was only thirteen, and they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage. I don't blame them. I really don't. I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn't do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it, and you didn't know Allie. My hand still hurts me once in a while when it rains and all, and I can't make a real fist any more-- not a tight one, I mean--but outside of that I don't care much. I mean I'm not going to be a goddam surgeon or a violinist or anything anyway.