JD Salinger is dead

It's probably worse that I have never read anything written by him, and I study English. :look:

I should read The Catcher in the Rye right now...
 
Sad news, read Catcher at the right age, yada yada.
Maybe now some of his unpublished stuff will finally get pushed out, considering that he didn't want anything else published while he was still alive.
 
Yeah, what BN said: it's pretty good.

Too bad it gave birth to a generation of copycats that produced a tidal wave of (primarily) lesser works.
 
Sad news. The Catcher in the Rye is an important work. I would still punch Holden Caulfield in the ovaries for being a malcontent bitch, though.
 
You should go out and buy every copy of it that you encounter.

Every copy.

Do it.
 
Buxbaum666 said:
He died shortly after I finished Catcher in the Rye. Coincidence? :look:
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Reminds me of that scene in Once upon a time in Mexico when Johnny Depp is on a quest to find the best pork-meat-thing meal in Mexico, only to shoot the chef so that he can say he had the best pork-meat-thing in Mexico.


Is there any point in reading Catcher in the Rye (Catheter in the Eye as he was old, whatever, no biggie) since I'm no longer a teenager? I have a lot of angst though.
 
victor said:
Is there any point in reading Catcher in the Rye (Catheter in the Eye as he was old, whatever, no biggie) since I'm no longer a teenager? I have a lot of angst though.
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Read it. It's a classic piece of literature regardless of how old you are. At the very least, you can be nostalgic about your teenage years.
 
victor said:
Is there any point in reading Catcher in the Rye (Catheter in the Eye as he was old, whatever, no biggie) since I'm no longer a teenager?
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Yes. It's a good book. There's stacks and stacks of better ones tho, if you're just looking in general. Beyond its appeal to whiny teenagers there's really nothing that sets Catcher in the Rye apart, and it's really not deserving of the classic status put upon it.
 
victor said:
Is there any point in reading Catcher in the Rye (Catheter in the Eye as he was old, whatever, no biggie) since I'm no longer a teenager?
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Yes, there is. It really just is a damn fine book. I've read it twice, once when I was in my early twenties and another time about two or three years ago (so early thirties). It's really very stylized stylistically speaking, but that ain't the main point of interest, I think. Thematically this book breaks a lot of former constraints. It's about boredom and angst and as such it is really about nothing at all and a whole lot of things at the same time. And it focusses on a teen, solitude, emotions et al, hence it's popularity.

It's like what made 'A Confederacy of Dunces' possible. It's a great book, a fine piece of literary history. You should read it pronto.
 
alec said:
Thematically this book breaks a lot of former constraints. It's about boredom and angst and as such it is really about nothing at all and a whole lot of things at the same time.
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Only those constraints were broken by Goncharov almost a full century before Catcher in the Rye, since Oblomov is about pretty much exactly the same things.

But hey, weird Russians, who cares right?
 
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