“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
Studied it in English for GCSE a few years back and it’s one of those books that really made an impression on me, so much so that I bought my own copy. Not sure where it went, so I put it into my Amazon shopping basket and forgot about it for a while. Until I was making an order a few days ago and I decided to actually get round to pulling it out of the “Saved for later” section into the order.
It’s one of those books that I think everyone should read at least once in their life, preferably when you’re 16/17/18, around the same age as the protagonist of the book, Holden Caulfield. It was written in 1945/1946, but it’s as applicable to modern life as it ever was, and it was extremely controversial when it was first published and still is to this day; the protagonist swears, talks about sex, drinks underage, etc. as he spends a few days by himself in New York after being kicked out of his boarding school.
It’s a novel with a lot of complex themes and meanings and it would do you a disservice if I started trying to explain them out of context.
I know in my life I’ve felt a lot like Holden, I’d imagine an awful lot of people have. It’s a book that’s really about that turning point in your life when you’re becoming an adult, and the loss of innocence and the pain that comes with it, trapped between the purity of childhood and the insincerity and “phoniness” of the adult world.
If you haven’t read it, I really would urge you to. It’s one of those books that, like 1984 and others, has informed our collective culture. The mythology surrounding it is pretty crazy, the guy who shot John Lennon for instance was obsessed with Catcher in the Rye, he even read extracts from it at the trial.
Anyways, in other news, I’m headed to Barcelona later today, and I may not be back for some time. Well, a week.
So I will see you beautiful people around!