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.

I read it on my own, and I think I liked it. But I don't remember many details about it.

My copy of Bone Crossed by Patricia Briggs just arrived! I had been waiting for it to come out in paperback. It's perfect timing because TCG is working late, and I have no plans for the evening.

I can't imagine what it would be like to read in the fifties, since everyone's a wiseass now and the shocking part to me reading in 1990 or whatever is that I didn't see anything in it to make it the de facto book for serial killing psychos. Now, I understand that it was feeding an impulse in those already Not Right but the first time I read it, I expected it to be violent since Mark Chapman loved it so much...I wonder if Salinger ever knew that and if it ever made him sad. Because Holden is obviously smarting off when he says he's "hunting people".