The Catcher in the Pie

Hey welcome back to the Z13 book club, this week I just finished reading The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger, a classic of english literature. For the purpose of this post I'm just going to refer to the book as Catcher.

I'm sure many of you out there have already read Catcher, in high school most likely, or seen John Green's videos on it on Youtube, but this is my first time ever reading it. I find it useful to read an old book every so often.

So the novel Catcher follows this teen boy name Holden Caulfield and is narrated from him remembering the events a year later. Holden recounts how at the age of sixteen, just before christmas vacation, he is flunking out of his school and instead of sticking around to the end of the semester, leaves a few days early and goes home to New York. Holden doesn't get along with people too well, and keeps trying to get people to listen to him, but nobody does until the end. In the novel Holden basically bums around new york for a weekend, asking some very peculiar questions, but if you pay attention there is deeper meaning than what lies on the surface.

Catcher reads like a book much bigger than it is. In the edition I read the chapters simply started immediately after the previous one ended and if you're like me that is annoying because when I stop reading I stop before the beginning of the first new paragraph on that page, which not only mean I could stop a paragraph into a chapter, but sometimes a paragraph could span three pages, Salinger wasn't the most artful with the paragraph.

I found Catcher started a bit too slow, it was hard to keep interested in the beginning while he was still at his boarding school or when he had first arrived in New York, but leater, maybe the last 75 pages, kept me glued to the book in a way that I had to finish it before I moved on to something else.

I recommend Catcher to anyone out there who likes fiction. It is a good read but also a good way to see how some of your favorite writers were inspired (like John Green) and the character of Holden Caulfield may even remind you of someone you know.

Enjoy


　

P.S.

Here is a link to John Green's Crash Course episode on Catcher (1 of 2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R66eQLLOins&list=PL8dPuuaLjXtOeEc9ME62zTfqc0h6Pe8vb
　

-Horace