There’s something so crazy about turning the last page of a book. I swear there is. Old McQuail told me I needed to read this book by some crazy phony who hides out in the middle of nowhere. He doesn’t even tell people where he is or nothing. I swear. So you know I did? I went over to the Boulder Bookstore and bought The Catcher in the Rye. Anyway, the goddamn book was really good. Honest it was.
This is one of those books that seems to be all over the summer reading lists in high school but never made it onto my desk. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe this is exactly when I was supposed to read it. Either way, it is one of the best I’ve picked up in a long time. I knew it was going to be good from the get go. First off, the book has no description, just a title and an author. There’s not one review or introduction, I love that. For those of you who’ve read it, I was poking around for other info on Holden and came across this interesting bit:
Holden Caulfield’s last name links to the novel's famous rye-catcher metaphor, in which Holden wants to be the person responsible for catching carefree children playing in a field of rye from obliviously falling off a nearby cliff. A "caul" is a membrane that covers and protects embryos and remains on some babies after birth, so that, in "holding caul" in his rye field metaphor, Holden Caulfield wishes for all children to retain the pure, youthful ignorance they possessed before birth (before being brought into this world)—to, figuratively, retain their caul. Through the aforementioned metaphor, Holden wants to prevent children from nearing the symbolic cliff at the edge of the field, from which they must fall, metaphorically maturing into adults and thus ultimately losing their childhood innocence. [via]
This book is spilling over with amazing lines/passages, but this one had me stand up on the London Tube and remark with non-verbal utterances of praise.
“Look,” I said. “Here’s my idea. How would you like to get the hell out of here? Here’s my idea. I know this guy down in Greenwich Village that we can borrow his car for a couple of weeks. He used to go to the same school as I did and he still owes me ten bucks. What we could do is, tomorrow morning we could drive up to Massachusetts and Vermont, and all around there, see. It’s beautiful as hell up there. It really is.” I was getting excited as hell, the more I thought of it, and I sort of reached over and took Old Sally’s goddamn hand. What a goddamn fool I was. “No kidding,” I said. “I have about a hundred and eighty bucks in the bank. I can take it out when it opens in the morning, and then I can go down and get this guy’s car. No kidding. We’ll stay in these cabin camps and stuff like that till the dough runs out, I could get a job somewhere and we could live somewhere with a brook and all and, later on, we could get married or something. I could chop all our own wood in the wintertime and all. Honest to God, we could have a terrific time! Wuddya say? C’mon! Whuddya say? Will you do it with me? Please!”
A great read. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy. Or don’t. He’d probably prefer you didn’t go out of your way or anything.
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