The Catcher in the Rye
discussion
Did you hate this book in high school?
Ayden wrote: "all my friends hated it, and thought it was stupid and depressing, and they hated Holden. (Which, maybe I add, they had no valid reasons to back that up)"
Since when have human beings needed valid reasons to hate?
Since when have human beings needed valid reasons to hate?
Yes I hate Holden Caulfield, I read Catcher in the Rye during my high school. It was a depressing book indeed. Salinger's language was quite annoying. However, the book does help show a unique perspective, on what phony people do and think. It made me realize how many phony people there are around me. Also when Caulfield secretly goes to meet his sister, that part brought tears to my eyes.I hate Caulfield for his apathetic attitude and lack of any sense in life that J.D. seems to portray. All in all, I've read better books than Catcher in the Rye, and I would not call this one a good read.
Maybe if I read it after a couple of years, I might like it but I don't intend to pick this book up again.
Absolutely. I hated every single letter of his stupid name, every single word he said, the way he talked, he moved, he thought. Everything about him was freaking wrong to me. But I didn't really had any reasons. I made a review about The Catcher in the Rye as a highschool assignment and that was it. I finally could stop thinking about this guy. But then I realized I couldn't. This guy took my entire mind, he made his way in and now he wouldn't just go away.
So I had to read it again and again and again. And again. And... I'm still trying to figure out what I feel towards this flit.
Funny story, my actual partner read it in highschool as well and she feels like she started to become more and more likely to him the more she read.
I agree with you, Ayden. I read it in my sophomore year and loved it. However, none of my friends liked it.
I liked the book. My heart went out to Holden as Salinger took us through his breakdown. He was having a breakdown and no one noticed. He tried as hard as he could to hold it together, but it was too much and overpowering for him. We don't take the time to see what's happening to the people around us. We think they're weird and other things, but we don't try to get them the help that they need.
I loved it when I read it at the same age Holden is in the novel. Then, not long ago, I picked it up again, ready to be as emotionally engaged as I had been. It didn't happen. I wanted to tell him to stop whining and do his homework.
Yes, I really did hate this book. I found Holden's character very annoying and to me unrelated. It was painful enough to have to read this book but writing a paper on this book was even worse.
I am a sophomore in high school, and I read it both my freshmen and sophomore year. I loved it. It really portrays the feelings of teenagers, and the lasting affect hasn't left in the contemporary age. Holden may be a bit depressing, but so is The Fault in Our Stars, yet everyone loves that book. Sometimes, we need depressing. It helps us realize the problems in our own lives. Holden is an exaggeration of the alienation that all teens have felt or still feel during their high school days, and sometimes, you need to take a couple days to think about life, and there isn't anything sad about it. It's just life. Catcher in the Rye is a hauntingly beautiful coming of age novel with a realistic take on the jumbles thoughts of a teenager.
this book was better than other books my high school is making us. I Did like it
I think I see what's happened. Our reading the book in high school may have colored how we feel about the book. Do you think if we had a teacher who didn't quite understand, then we didn't like the book? Erin, above, has made several good points worth considering.
Yes I read this book and Yes I hated reading it. I actually ended up disliking all novels that I was forced to read in high school. I never started to enjoy reading until I got to choose my own books and got to enjoy them at my own pace. Sad really.
I read the book in high school and I loved it then and I still love it now. I feel that Holden's alienation and general morbidity and depression is a powerful device. Especially as a device when people read the book and hear Holden's very extreme cynicism. Instead of understanding why we just tell him to get it over it.
This book was one of the reasons I started studying psychology.
This book was one of the reasons I started studying psychology.
I read this book freshman year in high school and hated it. it was completely boring.
I read this book as an adult and I couldn't engage with it. Maybe if I had read it as a teen I would have. I didn't get emotionally caught up in the story and I didn't care much for Holden. It felt like a well written book of a Dawson's Creek episode, lots of words but lacking in content and meaning.
I’m in high school and I read it recently. I really liked I think if Holden was real id like him. He's really smart but he's a show off, he wants to be a very secure guy but the fact that everyone he meets goes away really makes him depressed and loses his confidence. Sometimes the books gets a little boring because Holden mentions things that nobody cares about but I think anyone over 15 can enjoy this book depending on his taste.
The first time I read this I was in my late 40's. I hated school so I really wanted to like this book because it had been suggested to me for this reason. After reading it I was confused? This guy went to a private school and somehow missed the lesson on where ducks go in the winter time. I got out the Cliff notes and they were stupid. Really they didn't even have you play the song at the end of the book and relate it to the stock market....which I think is obvious if you reaching for the gold ring....power, money??? What was the song? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbQuY... Then reading and watching the movie The 39 Steps would give you another hint that maybe this isn't a coming of age story as they try to pawn it. Remember that Salinger wouldn't let them make his book into a movie. Holden hated the movies but here he takes Phoebe to The 39 Steps ten times till she has memorized it.
If you are not satisfied with the "standard" interpretation of this book I invite you to visit my group called Breaking the Code To the Catcher in the Rye. https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
Here we explore The Catcher through the lens of history and especially WW2.
It took my forever to get to thay point were you dont wanna put the book down so i gave up put it down and never finished it.
Its not. My english teacher recommend it to me. For a while it was ok. Then it was just him being lonely in the city.
I'm from Norway. We don't read books at school over here.
No, we didn't get to read it. I read it on my own, though, and it was great. I've realized the books we're forced to read in high school kind of ruins the experience of the book. Even the Great Gatsby was a bad experience for me because my teacher shoved it down my throat. I read it solo afterwards and I loved it.
I agree if you read a book in high school and hate it, read it later and you might love it.
This reminds me of Brave New World when the children are electrocuted when they are playing with the books. Nothing like an assignment to create repulsion. I thought it must not be a very good book if they have to assign it to read. Then as an adult decided to read some of these books and thought they should have thrown away the text books...they were a complete waste of time. Just little bits of facts all day long with no cohesion. Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
Fijke wrote: "Paul Martin wrote: "I'm from Norway. We don't read books at school over here."None at all? I'm from the Netherlands and here we don't have the kind of list of required reading they have in Americ..."
I'd love to say that it's an exaggeration, but in my case it's not. Literature has lost most of its status here, and all we did in school was read short excerpts (and maybe a film adaptation now and then) - not entire books. It's perfectly normal and acceptable to graduate high school with good grades and then continue on to university without having read anything by the few famous writers we've had, such as Ibsen, Hamsun, Kielland, Bjørnson, etc. It's been 5-6 years since I graduated though, so maybe things have changed, although I highly doubt it!
I know some people from the Netherlands, and from my interactions with them (and other Europeans, for that matter) I find it quite obvious that in terms of academic knowledge, we are embarrassingly inferior.
And yes, very off topic, but fun!
Read it. Hated it. Have put it (and a number of others they made us read in high school)on the "never read again" list.
Having had a sheltered childhood, honestly, I just didn't get it back then.
I have been sheltered under my own agreement. I dont like the world, it's to scary for me. Ther is always a chance of dying or getting kidnapped or raped. I have maybe gone out with my best friend once. Other than that i see her at school. So when i read this book i didnt understand it either. So have way thru the book i gave up and put them down!
One of my all-time least favorite books. I read this as a sophomore in HS. I hated it because of the terrible language Holden used. I had never heard any one of my contemporaries use such profanity. In fact I had never heard an adult swear like he did. He just seemed like such a loser.
I read the book in high school. I hated it. Actually hate wasn't a strong enough word. Read it again in college, again...hated it. Picked it up one day, when I was an adult, thought I would give it another try because well maybe my taste matured. Made it a third of the way through the book and thought "nope, still hate it."
i hated it in my graduation days...i still hate it..it's about a loud mouthed,arrogant brat who thinks he is above all. Getting expelled is cool for him.He has an attitude problem and that is not my idea of literature at all...
I read this book for the first time in middle school because (amazingly enough) my *mother* owned it, loved it, and recommended it to me. I was a sad, lonely, alienated teenager and it was a revelation to me that there were other kids out there who also felt like that. I also very much related to Holden's feeling of not really having a sense of purpose or control over his life. I read it several times in middle and high school and it was one of my very favorite books.When I went back to read it 30 years later as a parent of middle school students, I had a completely different take on it. My read of it was colored by the statement (I think on page 3 or 4) by Holden that *his brother had just died*, which is such an incomprehensible thing for a kid to have to deal with and which I had completely missed reading it as teenager. I couldn't relate to Holden in the way that I had when I was 13, but I had a tremendous amount of compassion for him having to deal with this loss at a time of life that is already so difficult.
I have been thinking about this thread and how many of you hated the book The Catcher In The Rye. I didn't care for it at first for all the reasons mentioned, but I changed my mind...first when I watched the Alfred Hitchcock movie The 39 Steps ( and thought why did Salinger name this movie when he says he hates the movies...and saw that there was a man that was stuffed with facts, just like kids, and when he had used these facts for the benefit of those that have it to him he was killed). So then I wanted to read the book...knowing that more than the movie Salinger was probably highlighting the book. That prove to lead to to other clues about the book....like how Holden got a good Good-bye. I think the problem with The Catcher In The Rye is that teachers have relied to heavily on Cliff Notes which have done exactly what Salinger didn't want done to his book by film producers...it made you focus on their interpretation of the book. Rather than ask questions and search for the answers yourself.
The book is hard to really understand in a way that gives it meaning in the classic sense unless you have a background to the movies, and artist first songs and movies, and the books and authors mentioned.
Since most of you have read the book that are on this list I wonder how "they" explained the ducks? And where they had gone, our what significance it played.
Did anyone ever think that The Catcher might be an allegory? Or try to read it that way? Just for fun? For instance wonder if the name Allie was a metaphor for Allies? Holden is a car and if you read the short story mentioned by Holden by Ring Lardner...you will see...maybe a different picture of the Rye...which rye is mentioned in the short story.
If you read Out of Africa which Holden says he would love to sit down with the author...I think that you would come away with this. Ibsen says that the plantation that she was running was on the people of Africa's land and that the people were squatters on her land but that really isn't the way it should have been. You could look at it a different way when BP polluted the Gulf of Mexico, no one got put in jail over that. But if we empty a car of oil on the street in California and endangered a bird habitat we would get the book thrown at us. BP is an absentee landlord extracting our oil and making us pay for the privilege. I mean the way we are treated you would think we were squatters. How is war like that?
We can't kill anyone except if there is a war....you get my point.
I think the problem, I have is people are trying to read this book like a story and they are missing a lot of meaning. Salinger had a different kind of education from most of us and if you let him he will teach you the history of war, money and power.
I had to go somewhere so I will write some more.Do you remember how Holden said that he wouldn't want to be Somerset Maugham friend who wrote Of Human Bondage. I thought at first that was because of the kind of book title that he writes about. But when I looked him up on Wikipedia I found out he was a spy. Now Holden doesn't tell you in the text "why" but the hints abound in the "name dropping".
Remember when he tells you that when the girl's tell him that they are going to Radio City Music Hall? ...that that "killed him"....look up the history of Radio City...how could that have been used to CON-Vince people that the war was a good thing and to sign up....Don't forget to watch Stand Up And Cheer.
When I was a girl one of my favorite games used to be a clue game. Someone would hide a clue on a piece of paper where to find the next clue. After you found that clue it would lead you to the next, till finally you found the golden egg.
Why so many profane God and goddam? Do you not see a lot of profane "God" words in your daily life? Many of you (as I was) was uncomfortable with this. I was too being raised a Christian. The first time I tried to read the book I put it down...but I picked it up later and read it and was encourage to read it again by a teenager. I thought I had missed something...and I had but not sure it was what he liked about the book as I never talked to him again. But I decided I was going to ignore the profanity. That he put it there to keep some people from reading hos book. Like an insecticide. I eventually was les bothered by it...just like many of you today are probably clueless to all the profane "God" words that you use today...If you are American that is....because you don't "see" them anymore. But they are right under your nose....look at your money. What duo you know about the one that had a pyramid on it? Doesn't Holden talk about the Egyptians two different places in The Catcher In The Rye. Once when he wrote it in a term paper that he hands into his teacher Spencer.
Spencer is Holden's history teacher...he is proud of a Indian blanket that he got in Yellowstone. Remember?
Now if we look up the name Spencer in Google we will get Herbert Spencer the one that comes the phrase "survival of the fittest". But it is kinda unfair don't you think...to say that evolution didn't pick the Indians to survive because we have them blankets with small pox and kicked them off their land? How was this like war? And how through evolution have we come to vilify our enemies mow them down then just look on and figure that was evolution in action?
So for those of you that are outside the US I would suggest you look up the one dollar bill and see that it has the words "In God We Trust". Read about it and you will find that the money isn't money but debt.
I suggest a video on this called "The Secrets Of Oz" which is on YouTube. And yes it is about the book The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz. Which is a children's book written with adult themes, just like The Catcher and just like Bambi: A Life In The Woods By Felix Salten....not at all Disney's version. "If there is one thing I hate, I hate the movies, don't even get me started"
Read the first few lines of Beowulf...which is a book mentioned in the Catcher...and see how this related. Beowulf is Saxon tradition...or German folk tale. Saxon was the name of the foot ball team.
Was Holden irresponsible?...does it matter? Not when you see The Catcher was written like a "code breaker" book and not a story book. We have been taught what to see, just like we have been taught what our money means. We are the profane according to some. If you want to read more of this look at my group Breaking The Code Of The Catcher In The Rye it is listed in the Catcher In the rye discussion groups.
Hope you all will want a "higher education"...than the dumbing down one they pond of here in America.Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
Google this author and find his video on The Ultimate History Lesson and find out the rest of the story.
Bet you didn't know that Darwin's was related to the father of eugenics.huh? I learned it on this video. Check out my John Taylor Gatto bookshelf for the book this relative wrote.
Education is not free. Everyone is responsible for their own.
Yeah it really is a "I LOVE THIS BOOK"/"I HATE THIS BOOK" kinda book. :P For me, I loved it. I had a great high school teacher who taught it, which helped, but i just also really loved the writing style. Him going around New York, making his smart ass (but yes depressing) remarks. I just found Holden an interesting character with a lot of sides. At times I pitied him, other times he made me laugh. Lots of times I could sympathize with him. Great book, it made me think a lot. I could also reread it and feel that sense of nostalgia that the book gives me.
Yeah. I tried to read it again in my thirties - still hate it.
I read it in high school, or maybe a little before.I thought it was okay, although a few pages in I realized that Holden was full of it.
Never understood what the big deal was with this book.
Read it at school and detested it for how boring it was (didn't find it depressing.) Holden was such a whiny, self-absorbed twit. I wanted to smack him every time I turned the page, so that he'd stop complaining long enough for the book to end.
I read this early in high school, when I was about 14 or 15, and I loved it. I could relate to Holden becuase I pretty much hated anything I deemed "phony". Then I read it when I was in my senior year of high school and I hated it. Holden became very annoying to me, the only part I did admire about him was his wish to protect the innocent from learning about the wickedness of the world.
Ayden wrote: "So did any of you read this in high school and hate it?"Here's my theory about loving and hating Holden: http://redroom.com/member/monty-heyin...
I read this book as a freshman in high school and did not like it. I especially did not like Holden because of his disgusting habits- something very important to me at the time. I have come to appreciate its genius and need to re-read it.
I loved this book when I read it at age 16. However, not so much when I re-read it 30 years later when I jus wanted to kick Holden in the butt.
Andie wrote: "I loved this book when I read it at age 16. However, not so much when I re-read it 30 years later when I jus wanted to kick Holden in the butt."I wonder if you read it trying to understand what the hat meant? Or the ducks? Or the reason that he took Phoebe to see The 39 Steps? Have you heard of the bookHow to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading? Do you think that Salinger wrote a children's book about an adult theme such as war, power money and mind control? Can you reread the book again with those questions? Or are you just satisfied with the squib that your focus was on Holden. Did you read the first page of David Copperfield and discover the Caul-field?
This is one of my favorites! I read this book at the age of 14 and really connected with Holden. Most people always tell me "He's just a big full of it jerk who cusses out all the time and can't stop wining." This is because many people don't understand the book or who Holden is.
Hey everyone I just wanted to give everyone a heads up that there is a buddy read herehttps://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
ForThe 39 Steps
This is the book that the movie is named after that Holden takes his sister Phoebe to. Maybe some of you would like to read it with us.
Hated it then, hated it now.I felt the protagonist was spoiled and unable to face reality, using excuses to explain his behavior.
I loved this book when I read it in high school, but I think that I would hate it if I read it again as an adult.
Joyce wrote: "I loved this book when I read it in high school, but I think that I would hate it if I read it again as an adult."I think if you read it with adult eyes you might find something different in it. My favorite scene is the carousel at the end of the book...did you play the song Smoke Gets In Your Eyes? And imagine Phoebe reaching for the gold ring, but Holden not able to tell her that she might fall of her dead beat horse? And think about the dreams women have had entering the workforce, having a new home and getting the American Dream, but not told that they might lose their house, job and husband. And in the end not really be better off.
The scene in the museum is also good. Of course there are a lot of voices that question whether Columbus discovered America, but I think Salinger was trying to remind you that the Indians were here before Columbus discovered America. This brings to mind Holden's history teacher, Mr. Spencer. Herbert Spencer coined the phrase Survival of the fittest. Mr Spencer is really proud of the Indian blanket that he has wrapped around him...of course this is to remind us that we have the small pox on the trail of tears because they wouldn't just give us their land.
Of course Holden reminds us that sure Mr. Spencer, sure life's a game, if you are on the right side of "might makes right".
But even if you had already figured this out maybe you haven't treated yourself to watching the movie The 39 Steps that Holden takes his sister to see 10 times. But then you will want to read the book The Thirty-nine Steps
. You will then be able to understand how Holden got a good Good-bye. (Although looking up the names of the guys he was throwing the football with will also give you a good clue.There us so much history in The Catcher in the Rye. So much literature and movies and songs and references to "places" that there is a lot more here than Cliff notes would have you believe. It took Salinger 10 years to write this book.
Kenneth wrote: "Hated it then, hated it now.I felt the protagonist was spoiled and unable to face reality, using excuses to explain his behavior."
In the first paragraph of the book Salinger tells you this is not a David Copperfield kind of book. If you read the first page of David Copperfield you would see that the name Caul-field is derived from it...and the meaning of Caul.
I believe the book The Catcher In The Rye is an allegory. It is written as a children's book (YA) because Salinger's views were not popular at the time. By highlighting The 39 Steps/
book he was trying to bring to light how wars are really created. To really read The Catcher use this book as a reference
you have only read it on a very light level. The first level...if you are a history buff then you will find this book pregnated with meaning.I hope you ask will question your first impression and give the Catcher another chance.
Oniria wrote: "Absolutely. I hated every single letter of his stupid name, every single word he said, the way he talked, he moved, he thought. Everything about him was freaking wrong to me. But I didn't really ha...""This guy took my entire mind, he made his way in and now he wouldn't just go away."
hahaha Oh wow.
Yes to the first question, no to the second. I'm from the UK and my English teacher insisted on reading the book aloud to my class in a phoney (see what I did there?) American accent. Hilarity.