On Catcher in the Rye
first, i must say that yes the blog is back but that its serving the purpose of being my bullshit philosophy house for the time being. and its mine and i get to decide what to do with it so i’m going to use it to post my opinions as i go through this gigantic apostasy that i rolled into mid-june. my apologies for not keeping you posted. but i’m not even really keeping myself posted so you’ll just have to get over it.
i started reading generation x by douglas coupland today and on the back it says “a modern catcher in the rye” – cosmopolitan. and i got really angry. even though i like the book a lot (or at least what i’ve read of it) i think that its bad to compare anything to catcher in the rye and that we do this way too much.
its like suddenly, ever book with good character development and no plot is suddenly catcher in the rye. similarly, ever new age guy with a degree in astrology or mythology is suddenly the messiah. catcher in the rye was a beautiful book with a lot more to it than being the precursor for every plotless book to follow. and in a lot of ways, its kind of like my bible. and jd salinger is like right under god to me. like if god quits one day (i don’t think god will quit but still) jd salinger is going to have to fill in. and besides, franny and zooey kind of defined a lot of my religious beliefs. so i get mad when being like catcher gets thrown into every other book review. nothing is like catcher and if they really wore, wouldn’t like the next plotless book be a modern generation x or whatever. dammit.
also, until they apparently read this book, i did not realize cosmo was literate.