The Catcher in the Rye

It was an easy read. Just like someone’s telling you things. Like having a conversation with someone but you’re just listening to him talk. I like him, I must say, the author. At first, I was bored with his style but after a while I kind of enjoyed it. See, I think I am actually imitating his style right now. I like him. He made me laugh most of the time. And made me cry a little twice. Did I tell you I like him?

I am far from busy this semester, like I said in one of my recent posts. School takes up just about six hours of my entire week; studying for my subjects takes up about… well, I haven’t done that yet. I’m much more in the mood to read and write and fix my life.

The Catcher in the Rye is about a boy who got kicked out from college, flunked all his subjects aside from English. He hated how things went in there. It was just a story of what he did before going home. He doesn’t want to go home ‘til Wednesday, the day his parents would receive a letter from the school headmaster informing them about their son’s dismissal. And there were a lot of digressions on it. A lot. His thoughts along the way made it interesting.

I don’t want to compare authors since I respect their individual styles and I think everyone is good in their own ways. There weren’t much of quotable quotes in the book, unlike Dostoevsky. But that was a good thing in a way that I am not so anxious to mark pages with pretty lines. So I was able to focus on listening to the author talk, naturally.

I just said I do not want to compare authors but I’d also like to mention Charles Dickens here. He’s a classic, really. I’d like to think he’s the author’s favorite author. By the style of his writing, it may not be apparent. But he mentioned David Copperfield and Charles Dickens in the book. Okay, that may not mean anything at all, but I’d like to think that so please let me. Thinking about Dickens could have made his writing suck, but it didn’t. I don’t remember the last time I actually finished reading a book – I usually start reading and gets bored afterwards so I end up grabbing another book before even knowing the ending of the previous one. I do that most of the time. But The Rye, as I’d like to call it, actually got me wanting for more. I felt the author right in front of me, really. And oh, how I just wish I could hold him!

So about the not-so-many quotable quotes, I just have here three:

Certain things they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.

The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

Okay that last one just got me. Arrector pili muscles contracting! (Goose bumps) I don’t know why. Well, actually I do know why I just do not want to tell it here. I like authors.



P.S.

I am aware that my writing here and on my recent post is influenced by J.D Salinger. :D