With our hectic lives and all of the new books that we are trying to keep on top of, we can often forget about the classics, those books that we loved to re-visit or the books that we just haven’t got to quite yet. Every week, we pick a classic book of the week that is a favourite of ours in the office. This week will be the wonderful The Catcher in the Rye.
Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
A history of the Catcher in the Rye.
The Catcher in the Rye is the brilliant 1951 novel by the author, J.D. Salinger and is certainly one of the most popular novels of all time. Thankfully, the film is yet to be made into an on-screen adaptation but is often listed as one of the greatest reads of all time. It has now been translated into most of the world’s major languages and continues to sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year. In fact, the Catcher in the Rye has sold about 65 million copies and still sells about 250,000 thousand copies a year. Holden Caulfield, the book’s lead character, has become an iconic character and the book’s fame has outstripped even the fame of its author. Apparently, this was the book that Mark Chapman was reading before he shot John Lennon.
What is it about?
The book revolves around the character of teenager Holden Caulfield, a lonely soul who seems slightly abandoned by his family and trying to find a connection with the world. Holden is a loner, but a loner that desperately wants to feel like he is a part of something. At the outset, he is expelled from his school and so begins an adventure in New York City which the reader is made privy to. However, all of the people he encounters annoy him in some way, the women he dances with at the hotel, the conversations with the nun and with the love interest Sally. Holden, it seems, never wants to grow old, he wants to be the Catcher in the Rye, a man who prevents people from jumping into adulthood, to remain a child with a child’s view of the world forever. It is at this point that we realise Holden is actually quite distraught from an event which occurred in his earlier life.
Why read it?
The Catcher in the Rye is a modern classic, a book that is so filled with disappointment and cynicism that it is almost uplifting. A part of us would like to tell Holden that he should grow up and get on with his life while the other half would like to preserve his childhood innocence forever; the very problem many encounter with their own children as parents. As well as that, Holden is hugely isolated, an issue which is becoming more predominant in modern society. If you can’t make connections with people, are you destined to a life of isolation and alienation and is that where Holden is heading? On top of that, Catcher is actually quite a short book and yet will have a long impact. You will always remember that first meeting with Holden Caulfield and from time to time you will want to revisit him in the moment of time he is preserved in. This is most certainly a classic that you should check out.
