Mass Market Paperback, 214 pages
English language
Published Nov. 1, 1984 by Bantam.
Story of Holden Caufield with his idiosyncrasies, penetrating insight, confusion, sensitivity and negativism. Holden, knowing he is to be expelled from school, decides to leave early. He spends three days in New York City and tells the story of what he did and suffered there.
Read for school, around 1979 or 1980. Did not like at all -- felt vulgar and depressing. Would probably experience it differently today but have no desire to reread. Let those who love it enjoy it, but if you didn't like it don't feel guilty.
Although the book is a bit of a drag today, if read in the context of when it was released it's easy to understand why this is such an influential book
I never read this book as an adolescent/teen, so maybe it would have made a greater impact on me if I had. As an adult, it is hard for me to see why this is such an influential book. Salinger's very conversational writing style lends itself to developing the character of Holden Caulfield, but it is also distracting and sometimes hard to follow. I wish Holden were a more sympathetic character, and I wish that he had found peace (or even just a date with Jane) before the end of the book so I would have a reason to cheer for him, but instead I found it difficult to care very much about his fate.
I see what the hype is about.
I read this book when I was 17 and hated it so much that I am unlikely to ever re-read it with a more "literary" eye. I don't know why people like this book, and maybe if I didn't hate it so much the first time I would know why.
Bez znajomości kontekstu książka jest dużo słabsza.
Jeśli czujesz, że bohater jest bardzo irytujący, a jesteś dopiero w pierwszych szkolnych rozdziałach, śmiało przewiń do momentu, w którym bohater szkołę opuszcza.
Wtedy robi się troszkę ciekawiej.
Bohatera można nawet polubić. Przynajmniej mam takie wrażenie.
Długo zachowuje się on jak dzieciak, co sam zresztą przyznaje. Dlatego też myślę, że gdybym przeczytał tę książkę mając mniej niż 18 lat, zrobiłaby na mnie większe wrażenie.
I thought the book was really great. I kept laughing through the beginning of the book. Maybe I'm still an immature teenager at heart.
When I read The Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, I was underwhelmed. I don't remember much of the book. Only three images stuck in my mind: Holden Caulfield on the train to New York, Holden on the phone in his hotel room and the title image: Holden as the catcher in the rye. Other than that, I remember only that I was disappointed. So many people had told me to read the book. Many of them seemed to feel an affinity with Holden Caulfield. I didn't feel that kinship with Holden, and the book as a whole came nowhere near meeting my expectations. I didn't dislike it, but I didn't love it either.
Rereading it now is an entirely different experience. I went in curious about what had changed in the thirty years (has it really been that long?) since I last read the book.
I was immediately …
When I read The Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, I was underwhelmed. I don't remember much of the book. Only three images stuck in my mind: Holden Caulfield on the train to New York, Holden on the phone in his hotel room and the title image: Holden as the catcher in the rye. Other than that, I remember only that I was disappointed. So many people had told me to read the book. Many of them seemed to feel an affinity with Holden Caulfield. I didn't feel that kinship with Holden, and the book as a whole came nowhere near meeting my expectations. I didn't dislike it, but I didn't love it either.
Rereading it now is an entirely different experience. I went in curious about what had changed in the thirty years (has it really been that long?) since I last read the book.
I was immediately struck by the voice: a pitch-perfect 1950s teenagers. It's hard to believe that Salinger wrote this in his thirties. As I read more, I realized that it felt like a twelve or thirteen year old, not a sixteen year old. While Holden is by his own admission immature, and several of the people he encounters tell him this, nothing in the book reinforces that Holden is frozen in time as much as his own words and the way he uses them.
For the first half of the book, I had this nagging feeling: there was something disturbingly familiar about Holden's voice: the repetition of key phrases, the hyperbole, the high praise for some and the ability to dismiss so many as morons and phonies, the way he spoke about women. Yes, it pointed to Holden's immaturity, but it also brought to mind the Twitter stream of a current individual who has risen to the heights of power. It's remarkable that these words that were so carefully crafted to represent the thoughts of an immature sixteen year old could at times sound exactly like the way the most power person in the world has chosen to represent himself on Twitter.
I couldn't shake this feeling for the first half of the book, and it affected the way I felt about Holden, but things started to change in the second half of the book. As Holden's attempts to find human companionship became more and more desperate, as he almost as desperately pushed many of those same people away, I felt like I was beginning to feel differently about Holden. I began to hope that Holden could find that he was looking for. I wanted Holden to find the person who could talk him through what he was unable to go through himself.
The images that stayed with me—Holden on the train talking to a woman, Holden on the phone in his hotel room, Holden as the catcher in the rye—weren't just random images. Each of those images captured Holden's predicament. They weren't the only images that did. I wonder now why other images—his brother's baseball glove, the ducks and the frozen lake—didn't stay with me over the years.
As I came to the end of the book, I had the realization, obvious in hindsight, that it wasn't Holden who was the catcher in the rye. As much as he may have wished he'd been able to, it wasn't Holden who needed to do the catching. It was Holden who needed to be caught, who needed someone to stop him "going over the edge."
That realization was the difference. I missed it the first time around and was underwhelmed as a result. Strangely enough, I was probably too much like Holden as a teenager to appreciate the book. It isn't so much about feeling an affinity with Holden, it's hoping that he finds someone to catch him. I'm glad that I've come back to it after all these years. Having finished the book, it makes perfect sense that Salinger wrote it in this thirties, but that doesn't make it any less remarkable.
Continuing on my journey of the classics, I picked up this book with a lot of expectations - and that's where I went wrong. Maybe if I had read the tagline "for teenage readers", the outcome would've been different.
This story is from the perspective of a teenage boy going through his high school year & revolves around his general distaste of people, alienation and angst toward humanity in general. We all have gone through this phase at some point in our life and that's why I could somewhat relate to his ramblings. Without spoiling much, I would say this is a good (and light) read, but probably not a book amongst "the great literary classics".
The last time I'd read Catcher, I was a teenager. My big brother the novelist gave me the book like a final exam that I'd better pass if I was a brother of his. All I could appreciate at the time was Holden hated phonies and was "oppressed" accordingly. I hoped that was sufficient to keep my brother who I worshiped then, like Phoebe did Holden.
Reading it now is a completely different experience. I can see all the Salingerness in it. I notice that Holden even contemplates running away to a cabin in the woods. They send him to schools to prepare him for the real world but he resists them. Not for lack of ability, but for inner purity.
The big values in Catcher, and all of Salinger, really, are innocence and observation. Innocence allows you to see the falsity of the adult world. Observation permits you to …
The last time I'd read Catcher, I was a teenager. My big brother the novelist gave me the book like a final exam that I'd better pass if I was a brother of his. All I could appreciate at the time was Holden hated phonies and was "oppressed" accordingly. I hoped that was sufficient to keep my brother who I worshiped then, like Phoebe did Holden.
Reading it now is a completely different experience. I can see all the Salingerness in it. I notice that Holden even contemplates running away to a cabin in the woods. They send him to schools to prepare him for the real world but he resists them. Not for lack of ability, but for inner purity.
The big values in Catcher, and all of Salinger, really, are innocence and observation. Innocence allows you to see the falsity of the adult world. Observation permits you to see what everyone else is ignoring. These are super powers. The real world is built of kryptonite.
We can hate phonies along with Holden, forgetting for the brief time we read that we are the phonies. Oh, not really, we say--it's just that we have to live in the real world, right? Inside, we're still pure, we tell ourselves and by appreciating the book, we prove it to ourselves. Fact is, a phony has lost the ability to see their own phoniness. No one caught them in the rye and it's too late for them now. Them, not us, right? It's not too late for us because we can read Salinger.
The question about giving out your opinion about The Catcher In The Rye is that you feel like everything that you have to say has already been said by everyone else.
But the truth is that human experience (like opinions) are most of the times different inspite of similar. And that's what I believe is the biggest trumph of this book.
I must confess: I was hatting it in the first pages. It was looking like a pointless and superficial narration. I won't say it isn't. But I continued and started to believe there was more to it. Holden's complex personality reflecting the fight he was enduring with his growth and the contradictions he was becoming aware of generated not only some empathy with me as some feeling of needing to observe him. Because the representation of this human experience was quite well done in a perspetive of one person …
The question about giving out your opinion about The Catcher In The Rye is that you feel like everything that you have to say has already been said by everyone else.
But the truth is that human experience (like opinions) are most of the times different inspite of similar. And that's what I believe is the biggest trumph of this book.
I must confess: I was hatting it in the first pages. It was looking like a pointless and superficial narration. I won't say it isn't. But I continued and started to believe there was more to it. Holden's complex personality reflecting the fight he was enduring with his growth and the contradictions he was becoming aware of generated not only some empathy with me as some feeling of needing to observe him. Because the representation of this human experience was quite well done in a perspetive of one person only and what she thinks. It kept me almost wanting to talk to Holden and ask him a few questions. Or not... Because he was dealing with the world and everyone that passed by this would understand. Its not that I am moved. I am delighted with the painting of a personality through his eyes. And I am other eyes standing outside and judjing or being benevolent. I almost passively watch this story.
I think that what made me feel 'sort of depressed' about it in the end was the ending itself. I don't know what to feel abou it. Was it to logical, inevitable, bad, ok, realist, far-fetched,...? I can't decide. But it didn't felt right.
"I know he's dead! Don't you think I know that?
I can still like them, though, can't I? Just because somebody's dead, you don't stop liking them, for God's sake-especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than people you know that're alive and all."
Apparently this came out in 1945. I love how it's written in the way we still talk.
Heartbreaking and funny at the same time.
Somewhat underwhelming. I was unaware that opinions were actually mixed on this book. Count me among those who didn't identify with Holden.
When I read it half a lifetime ago, I was caught up in Holden's voice. This time I read it thinking, oh, this is sort of like my adolescent son.
Holden Caufield thinks you're a phony.
