I thought Holden was whiny and irritating.

Oh God, yes. I think it was standard non-required prep school reading, so, I read it, but I didn't enjoy it.

When I was a sophomore in high school, our English teacher gave us a 3-page list of Books Every Educated Person Should Read. The assignment: Pick one and read it. Half a dozen picked Catcher in the Rye. (I chose Brave New World.)

I did read Catcher a couple of years later. Holden is a well-drawn portrait of a certain side of adolescence -- he's supposed to be a whiny, irritating anti-hero. So on that score, I'd call Catcher a good novel that accomplishes what it sets out to do. But it certainly isn't an enjoyable read, and I fail to see how multiple generations of teenagers adopted it as The Ultimate Novel.

I read Catcher in 8th grade, and I thought Holden was whiny and irritating. But I don't have much patience with whiny characters--Hardy's Tess drove me bonkers. I just want to shake her soooo hard!

When I was in junior high, my teacher suggested reading the book as if Holden's narrative was his talking to a psychiatrist.

I think he is much less likely to appeal to "today's youth" whatever that is. But I did like the book, and read it on my own, not for class.

Actually, I wonder if Holden Caulfield was a proto-hipster?

ETA: I also liked Tess.

I read the book on my own, but with the understanding that not only was it a must-read, but that it was a classic and that Holden had been enshrined by many.

Accurate as it may be, I never got why I should care about his story. I don't need my protagonist to be likable, but he didn't have anything to recommend him to me.

I don't remember details about Franny & Zooey, but I don't recall disliking it either.

I read Catcher for an American Lit class in uni. It was good in context. But, yeah, Holden is irritating.

I've never read Catcher. I take it I wouldn't like it?

Accurate as it may be, I never got why I should care about his story. I don't need my protagonist to be likable, but he didn't have anything to recommend him to me.

This was pretty much my reaction. And I didn't really get what was supposed to be so profound and life-changing. At all.

I've read it two or three times, the first for class and the other two just for itself. The last time was close to a decade ago so I don't know what will have changed when I read it again, but chances are it will utterly wreck me. The huge, huge thing I remember from all three reads, aside from Holden's now-much-imitated but still utterly distinctive voice, is his huge love for his siblings. The dead brother is a hole in him that won't be filled, that he mostly lives with but never forgets, and Phoebe is to him what Matilda is to Emmett.

The scene where Holden gets all twisted up and despairing looking at the "Fuck you" scratched onto a wall and wanting to rub it out so Phoebe can never see it, and realizing he'll never be able to erase all the "Fuck you"s in the world? That's not exactly Emmett in the details, since he already swears like a sailor, but that ferocious hunger to protect the wee beloved is purely and precisely him. Wanting to be the catcher in the rye, saving all the little kids as they run around wildly, is pure Emmett. Watching Phoebe on the merry-go-round and crumbling under the weight of her presence, her self, how purely and separately herself and yet central to him she is, all Emmett.

The scenes with Mister Antolini kind of wrecked me, too--all the blundering and misunderstanding and that small sorrowful gesture of fumbling kindness and pity, and Holden's reflexive, destructive terror.

I totally and completely grok why it rubs so many people the wrong way and why it can be a completely unenjoyable, even loathsome experience, but I feel weirdly protective of it, as if it were an actual 15-year-old depressed boy wobbling into a nervous breakdown instead of just a book about him.