The Catcher in the Rye

"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody." This line is from the novel The Catcher in the Rye, which was published in the year 1951 by the author J.D. Salinger who lived from 1919 to 2010. This author is also known for other works, including Nine Stories and Hapworth 16, 1924.

This book is about a boy named Holden who has a number of issues. He never did well in school and after being kicked out of a nice private school because he loses fencing equipment on a bus. He proceeds to go live in a hotel and begins to think about girls. He meets one of his friends Sally and invites her to run away with him but she declines. After that he decides to head home to see his sister who he is very close to. He sneaks into his parent’s house in order to visit her and tells her about how he pictures himself as the sole guardian of a group of children running and playing in a huge rye field on the edge of a cliff. His job is to catch the children if, in their abandon, they come close to falling off the brink, to be a "catcher in the rye." Because of this misinterpretation, Holden believes that to be a "catcher in the rye" means to save children from losing their innocence. He leaves the house when his parents get home and later that week returns telling his sister he is running away and when she asks to come too he declines her and she becomes very upset which results in him not leaving. Later on he takes her to the zoo to cheer her up and when she’s riding the carousel he sees her laughing and smiling which makes him very happy. At the conclusion of the novel, Holden decides not to mention much about the present day, finding it inconsequential. He alludes to "getting sick" and living in a mental hospital, and mentions that he'll be attending another school in September; he relates that he has been asked whether he will apply himself properly to his studies this time around and wonders whether such a question has any meaning before the fact. Holden says that he doesn't want to tell anything more, because surprisingly he has found himself missing two of his former classmates, Stradlater and Ackley, and even Maurice, the pimp who punched him. He warns the reader that telling others about their own experiences will lead them to miss the people who shared them. I would like to read this book only because it is so famous otherwise i find it kind of boring. I think that it would have a very boring middle. I feel like it would be one of those books you're glad you read when you're done reading it.