buttered toast

The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

For the fortunate rest of us talentless enough to ever experience writer’s block, it still is quite possible for us to contract a less malignant but not any less depressing thing I believe we should call a reader’s block.

I’ve had my bookmark between p. 950 and p.951 of George R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords since the early part of Christmas break. After reading the first few pages of that chapter about a thousand times, I take it it’s just taking too much of a time for me to take all in so I moved on to the book I got queued up.

I’m pretty glad I asked Kate if I could change from my swimsuit in her room last week. I plucked out Catcher in the Rye from her shelf before coming out because I got so excited she had a copy and it’s one of those books I didn’t want to spoil the experience reading by reading off a PDF.

I read it on Thursday and had such a laugh that I thought of saving the last third for this morning, before breakfast. I really enjoyed the book. There’s much profanity in it, it’s almost rhythmic. You read it fast in a meter quite like they’re your own thoughts. It was a heck of a lot of fun to read. I was somewhat always looking for hints of something depressing about to happen. Books do that a lot - betray people. Hem, hem. Little Women. Movies too. Hem, hem, Dead Poet’s Society. The plot turned out a lot simpler than I had been expecting, though.

It just talks of this boy, Holden Caulfield’s few days out of school after being expelled where he experimented with girls, whoring, drinking, running away, the whole teen angst and rebellion theme, but it did not disappoint me at all. Holden Caulfield is such a cunning character you’ll love him.

I like how he struggles to explain things and ends up whipping up all these side stories with run-on sentences. Kind of like how I think.

I love how he’s such a cynic. He thinks teenagers and adults are all phonies although at some point, when you get to reflect on it, you’d agree a lot of things we do are quite phony.

I like how he’s so frank the way he talks about girls and how they “kill” him.

I like how he’s such a hypocrite and knows it. He thinks up all these whack and scandalous things he’d do but never does.

I like how he thinks he’s dumb.

I love him for flipping when he found FUCK YOUs vandalized all over a middle school.

I love how he adores his siblings; his older brother DB, a writer in Hollywood, his older than her age sister Phoebe, and his other brother Allie; died of leukemia. He really just adores children like they’re the only lovely thing left in this world. These lines just killed me.

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.”

Go read it if you haven’t yet.