My husband has been after me for years to read The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I never had to read it in school but his class had it assigned to him. He wanted to know what it was about because a girl in his class said that Holden reminded her of him. He could have read the book himself but he doesn’t do that sort of thing.
I’ll come right out and say that I hated this book. If I wasn’t committed to reading it for my husband I wouldn’t have gotten all the way through it. I think the reason that I hated it so much is that I’ve never had any tolerance for teenage angst. I’ve also always been a big fan of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. I could never stand people in school who asked why we needed to know something. So listening to Holden whine continously about how everything and everybody is stupid and talk about how he failed out of all his schools because he didn’t like the material made me crazy.
I looked up some book reviews online to see what I had missed. If this is supposed to be a classic book apparently I missed the good stuff. But none of the reviews gave me any insight into what are supposed to be good about it.
I hated Catcher in the Rye when I read it in high school and hated it again when I re-read it a few years ago. I think a lot of people idolize JD Salinger, (Gah) so there fore proclaim his work to be classics. There are so many great books out there, I always hate reading crappy ones and wasting my time.
I think I would have to agree with you. I wonder who decides what is a classic and what is not. I found ‘Catcher In The Rye’ nearly impossible to finish (almost as bad as ‘The Lost Language of Cranes’). If you really want to read a good book try ‘The Book of Wind ‘ by Carlos Ruiz Zafon – a book about books and the love of books.