f13.net

Which do we see first? Previously unpublished manuscripts from his estate, "previously unpublished manuscripts" from people who were "holding onto them for him", or "previously unpublished interview"? Is there a flood of movie adaptations of his work now that he can no longer summon his lawyers, or did his lawyers figure out a way to keep his complete authorial control alive from BEYOND THE GRAVE?

I like how all the news reports are how his disaffected anti-hero set the tone for a generation. What generation? Everyone who had to read it in high school?

The only thing that's stuck with me from the book how Holden's teacher used his thumb to pick his nose. Not really a big fan of Catcher.

I'm sad that an intelligent, well read man died.  Having said that, I hated Catcher SO FUCKING MUCH.  It is the only book I've wanted to burn.  And I'm a big literary anti-book burning nut.  Fahrenheit 451 is an amazing book, and I'm deeply against censorship.  But fuck Catcher in the Rye.  I wanted to personally strangle Holden Caulfield with every fiber of my being.  There was no worst book I was made to read in all my school studies (including the 400 page book about how much Athenian men loved to fuck little boys) than Catcher in the Rye.  It took everything I could muster not to rip that book up and throw it across the room.  FUCK.

So its been a bad week for lefty authors.  First Howard Zinn, and now JD Salinger.  I hope the 3rd person in the "celebrities die in 3's" curse is another old ass 60's lefty.  I really don't want somebody like John Stuart to kick the bucket or something.

Who has that much rage against Catcher in The Rye? LOL.  It's an impressive literary work by an author with a flair for excellent dialogue.  But it's not robot baby Jesus.

Catcher was great when it wasn't forced on me.

This.  The teacher I had for this book forced all sorts of metaphors and "what the author REALLY means here..." when I just thought it was a decent book about a disaffected kid who doesn't relate well and hates other people (almost like my life).  Having to write papers just to please the teacher made me never want to read it again.  My personal thoughts on books are if the author's deeper inner hidden meaning is *that* hard to get, perhaps it wasn't what he was going for or perhaps he should have just NOT been so obscure.

Who is John Stuart?  Or is that supposed to be John Stewart?  I'm not being snarky or a spelling nazi or anything like that, I just don't know.

Yes, I actually meant Jon Stewart.  There are to many ways to spell those names.   :oh_i_see:
This might be a possibility, so I should probably read it again now that I'm older.  But still, my memory was picking up the book and reading endless pages of "WAAAAGH" and spending endless pages yelling "AAAAAARRRGGH".

I remember liking Catcher in the Rye quite a bit, both when my mom made me read it at age 10 and when my teacher made me read it at age 15.  I'm going to find a copy and see how different it is at age whatever I am now.

It's clean, sparse, energetic prose.  You don't have to be fucking Mark David Chapman or anything, but you'd have to be a total douche to hate the book.

Coming from the person who is probably the biggest douche on the entire board (and that really takes alot of effort)..... that means absolutely nothing.

It takes more effort than you'd think.

I like Catcher, but it just seemed like a dumbed down version of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

:groan:

You wouldn't think that if you had to teach it in Art Theory to college freshmen.

Sorry, he just came off to me as a spoiled little rich kid.  Didn't empathize with him one iota.  Although we do have a weird family connection to the book, because apparently the school he's at at in the beginning of the book was based on the military school my Dad was sent to.  Supposedly, any way.  My Dad has claimed something to that effect.

I read it of my own volition when I was 20'ish, thought it was good.

Did you also dislike Seinfeld because they were bad people?  Or do you not consider that a fair comparison?  What about every other artistic work with flawed or unsympathetic characters?  Of course he's a "spoiled little rich kid."  If you look at a teenager's problems through the prism of an adult, they don't often seem significant.  Anyway, it's not like I'm championing this book.  I said it was well written.  I didn't cream in my panties while reading it or anything. Like I said above, I just thought hating this book was ridiculous.  Go hate New Moon.  This thing was at least well-written.

Because it is terrible trying to get Freshmen to understand it, or because Portrait is a bad book?

Whatever generation Mark David Chapman was in.

lol, no wonder we're fucked.

Good books cause strong emotional responses.  Just because you didn't like the main character doesn't make the book bad. 

Somehow I managed to never have it as required reading.  Just ordered a copy from Amazon.

I've been a heavy reader since I could first read, and the only thing that has ever had a negative impact on the enjoyability of reading for me is crappy english classes where I was expected to read only a chapter a week or some nonsense like that and be told how to "understand" the content of the book.

Thankfully that has only applied to an almost immeasurably tiny number of books in my life.

Didn't you guys have sparknotes and cliffnotes in highschool?  Whenever I had to read a shitty book I just resorted to that. 

Out school's policy in the honor's program was that if you were caught with them, the teacher could fail you from the class if they so chose to.  So if people *did* have them, they were extremely discrete as I never saw any around.

All of my teachers had copies of the CliffNotes for everything we had to read, and then tailored their tests so that people who did not do anything outside of using the CliffNotes would just barely pass.

Yeah, that's pretty much what all the good teachers I had did.  Except there was almost no way to pass if you just read the cliff notes.

I went to a very small high school, so they did their best to not fail anyone that actually put some effort (however misguided) into a test.

How did they manage that?  Did they delve into really insignificant minutiae?  I mean if you know the plot through and through and are original enough to come up with your own insights, I'm not sure how you structure a meaningful test that is designed to fail someone who didn't actually read the entire novel, but nonetheless has a firm grasp of its structure.  It's probably impossible, and it's just that the people who are reading Cliff's Notes are often those that can't  be bothered to do even that much properly, and do a botched skimjob of the notes, thus leading to their academic ruin.

I always wondered how the guy supported himself after basically doing nothing and publishing nothing for 50 years.  Did royalties from Catcher set him up THAT well, or was he secretly stocking shelves at Kmart the whole time?

Yeah, more or less that.  Trying to come up with, in your own words, the underlying meaning of any given book is hard for most of the dumb asses who just grab the cliff notes.  As I mentioned, the teachers read all the cliff notes, and if you wrote word for word or close (as some people did) explanations, you got failed.  Also, one English teacher I had would give weekly quiz's on what ever books we were to be reading.  He would ask 10 questions, all of which were very very easy.  But very pointless, and would only be known by those who read the actual book (cliff notes wouldn't have bothered).  These quiz's only made up 10% of the grade, but if you were not reading, you were going to fail them all, and knock an entire letter grade off your grade before even walking into the test, where you would continue to get reamed.

It still sells a quarter million copies a year (just looked it up).  I'd say that's plenty, especially since after the first run through, additional reprintings offer higher royalties.

Writing a book that gets into schools is pretty much a golden ticket. It doesn't even have to be Catcher big.

Of all the books I've ever had to read in middle/high/and college schooling, and I like to think I've been forced to read quite a few, I would say The Giver had to be the most rewarding, especially looking back. And I read it in 5th fucking grade.

The teacher who made me read that shitpile is now in prison awaiting trial for invasion of privacy and possessing child pornography.  I should mail him a copy.

My school forced a lot of lit on me, including Catcher. I remember nothing of it. Hell, I probably faked my way through it. I did that with a lot of stuff they told me I had to do. I'd light the anything by the Bronte's on fire right now. The only books I've ever enjoyed were the ones I've read on my own, with one exception. I was forced to read 1984, and I loved every second of it.

I liked most of my assigned work, but then I've had a number of teachers that truly appreciate good writing.

Wuthering Heights is one of the few books I was assigned in school that, to this day, I actively dislike.  That's not to say I've enjoyed every other piece of 19th Century English Literature I've read, but Wuthering is the standout.

Thankfully, with novels I was mostly able to read what I wanted to, even if that meant that I didn't quite understand the last paragraph of Brave New World until I asked my (9th grade English) teacher later...

I didn't mind Catcher, and I liked his short stories a lot more than Catcher.  But it will be interesting to see what juvenilia pre-NewYorker that will start to appear and what texts of the so-called Glass Family saga emerge post-Catcher.  I thought neurosis aside Salinger went into isolation to write a cycle of the Glass family from his short stories that was to resemble Proust's In Search of Lost Time.  I expect there will be lots of nuggets to emerge.  Just like we will start to see more and more from David Foster Wallace (who was being treated for mental illness during his life).

Regarding his position in the English canon?  Well, I remember in David Lodge's The Art of Fiction the section on "Skaz" as technique is credited or most illustrated by Salinger (teenage slang).  Of course Dickens and Balzaq and Twain were there first, but Salinger I thought was given special credit for this.

For me personally, Salinger has really been most influential on the short story.  He helped form a kind of very American  style and approach to writing that for many years the New Yorker exemplified.  It's a parody, but the sort of story of "boy reads book, boy is lonely, boy kills himself and is then remembered by friends, or has a family member kills themselves" etc.  Death is usually somewhere in Salinger and it's the way he justifies authentic self-reflection.  Again, I'm generalizing. And I haven't read him in maybe 15+ years?

Since none have appeared so far, I'll second the hope for newly discovered Glass books. Franny and Zooey is my favorite of his novels, and I too feel he truly shined in short story. If somebody wants to make movies out of them, I recommend Wes Anderson... who has an appropriately twisted eye for mystical resonance.