From the Bookshelf of Book Buying Addicts Anonymous…

So this story, it was about some funny bastard called Holden Caulfield, or whatever, I never could remember all those funny names. He got the ax and got kicked out of this really phony school called Pencey, and so this guy then bummed around in New York for two days, till he had to get back to his home. It killed me. No kidding. The guy was really depressed for half of the book and he kept going around and around and meeting all of these phony guys. It killed me. It really did. And there were all these funny things that happened in it, like, he has these fights with his roommate in Pencey and some elevator operator and he asks this girl to run away with him and realizes that he was actually mad all the time. Some funny things also happen when he goes to his little sister's school (he also has this bigger brother called D. B. who, like the freaking writer himself, uses his initals, and hangs around with some phony hot shots in Hollywood and he also has one other brother who died) and asks her to come to a museum, where his sister gets angry with him for not letting her go with him and then he decides that he will not run away, and they end up going to the zoo. There even is this red hunting hat which Holden wears, which I think is the symbol for the "catcher in the rye". It makes sense, too, as this Caulfield teenager I told you about, he tries to be an adult while still being an innocent kind of guy and he tries to find some traits in other adults like kindness and innocence which are in kids, and he misunderstands this poem by some bloke called Robert Burns which has a line about a body meeting a body through the rye or something, so he reads it as a body catching a body through the rye, and so he becomes this "catcher in the rye" who has to save kids from falling off a cliff or something. In one part, the part where he goes to his sister's school and all, he sees these bad words written on a wall and he is, like, totally mad after that, because he doesn't want those little kids in school to be harmed by it or anything. It really knocks me out, all that stuff about somebody twisting or distorting something. Anyway, I hate all that analogy stuff, it is just so phony, so I'm not gonna talk about it more. The one thing you need to know is that I thought this book was real fantastic because I enjoyed it and not in a phony way. I wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of mine and I could call him up on the phone whenever I felt like it. Now can you believe some freaking phonies tried to have it banned, for goodness' sake, and called it a bad book and all? Like, seriously, these phonies are always making a big deal out of nothing. But even then, it got many reviews saying it was good and got listed in some "Best Novels" list or something, but if you ask me, those lists are phony as heck, if you want to know the truth, just like those prizes. Boy, I hate prizes so much. I also hate those phony guys who give prizes. But what do you care? You're a phony for even reading this. You're all phonies. Boy, I hate phonies.