"we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac'.

[lindisfarne]

An interesting article in NY Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/weekinreview/21schuessler.html?hpw

The Catcher in the Rye,” published in 1951, is still a staple of the high school curriculum, beloved by many teachers who read and reread it in their own youth. The trouble is today’s teenagers. Teachers say young readers just don’t like Holden as much as they used to. What once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as “weird,” “whiny” and “immature.”

The alienated teenager has lost much of his novelty, said Ariel Levenson, an English teacher at the Dalton School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Holden’s home turf. She added that even the students who liked the book tend to find the language — “phony,” “her hands were lousy with rocks,” the relentless “goddams” — grating and dated.

“Holden Caulfield is supposed to be this paradigmatic teenager we can all relate to, but we don’t really speak this way or talk about these things,” Ms. Levenson said, summarizing a typical response. At the public charter school where she used to teach, she said, “I had a lot of students comment, ‘I can’t really feel bad for this rich kid with a weekend free in New York City.’ ”

Julie Johnson, who taught Mr. Salinger’s novel over three decades at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill., cited similar reactions. “Holden’s passivity is especially galling and perplexing to many present-day students,” she wrote in an e-mail message. “In general, they do not have much sympathy for alienated antiheroes; they are more focused on distinguishing themselves in society as it is presently constituted than in trying to change it.”

[angstlessk]

1. I read the fucking book cause I HAD to...boring..is all I can think of..n/t

[Skittles]

2. I was not impressed either

[lindisfarne]

6. I've heard everything from Beowulf to Lord of the Rings described as boring.

Many would find Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance boring.

One doesn't have to like every book out there. The idea, however, is to get exposed to a wide range of it. To learn how to understand it, in the context in which it was written, and to think about how it relates to the context in which one lives.

And, for the literature one likes, to simply enjoy. The world you create while reading is yours alone.

There is a lot I've read which I didn't enjoy. Some of that was read for an assignment. But I always managed to learn and grow through the process. Although I didn't always pursue reading other works from a particular author.

[TheWraith]

10. To be fair, LOTR has its bad moments.

I love the books to be sure, but one of the reasons the films were so popular is they managed to condense down the sweep of the storyline without getting into the weeds that Tolkien sometimes did, letting the story get dragged off into irrelevant side items.

I'll back up the top two comments--I found Catcher in the Rye to be mind-numbingly boring.

[lindisfarne]

11. I read the Hobbit right before seeing the movie - and hated the movie because it left out

so much. It turned what really is very much a philosophical work into an action movie, and I felt much was lost.

I just couldn't make it through the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy, though. Mainly because it was too gory.
I think I made it partially through book 1.
Never bothered with the other movies, either, despite some of the beautiful scenery! I'm not into action movies, and since the Hobbit didn't do a good job of converting to a movie, I didn't think the others would as well.

Now, for Harry Potter, I absolutely love the books and to a large extent, the movies. But I really get angry when they don't follow the books when they could have easily. I'm a bit looking forward to the next 3 with dread. I really felt Order of the Phoenix was by far the best of the books, and the movie the worst. It completely changed the story line, changed who does what. The same director is doing the last 3 movies (last book will come out as 2 movies because they argued they couldn't cram it all into one movie. They should have done that with Order of the Phoenix.)

[TheWraith]

18. I've never bothered with the film version of the Hobbit.

Nor with any of the previous versions of LOTR. Personally I felt that they did a decent job converting LOTR into a film, particularly in the extended cuts which

[LWolf]

21. Boring is subjective.

It depends, first, on the background knowledge, personal interests, and thinking patterns of the reader, and second, on the willingness of the reader to find something of interest in the material.

"Boring" is a state of mind.

[sasquatch]

3. I happen to agree, whining for the sake of whining is such bullshit

I thought Randall McMurphy was pure bullshit because he was nothing but a two-bit hustler that found a way out of a prison work farm by conning enough people into thinking he was crazy. I think it was a great book but McMurphy is a douchebag at best.

[MADem]

4. I read that book over forty years ago. I felt the same way.

"Suck it up, you whining whinging little shit. There are people in this world with REAL problems! Like, say, where their next MEAL is coming from! Get over yourself, ya little whinging angst-laden party pooper! Your life isn't so bad!"

Gee, maybe I have more in common with the young folk than I heretofore realized!

This comment is right on the mark:

‘I can’t really feel bad for this rich kid with a weekend free in New York City.’

[drmeow]

5. I remember liking it but

I think I found it confusing but that's all I remember. I don't remember the story at all. I've been reading/re-reading a lot of classics lately (Dickens, Fitzgerald, Cather, etc) - Catcher in the Rye isn't high on the list. Too many others I haven't read or remember liking better that I want to read first (although I have to confess, the list gets co-opted by what's actually on the shelf of "classics" at the local library when I get there to check them out :))

[lindisfarne]

7. I read all of Salinger's books and I thought there were others that were better

than Catcher in the Rye.

These days, I tend to pick an author and read most of his/her works in sequence, and perhaps a biography or commentary of some kind on the author. It's great to see how the author changes over time, and to learn details of the author's lives and relate them to their writing.

[drmeow]

19. I agree with you about the biography stuff

I now find myself very disappointed when a classic doesn't have some sort of description of what kind of life the author lead and also the context in which they were writing. On the other hand, I tend to avoid reading introductions which are basically critical essays about the book until I've finished as I want to read it without biases or interpretations which is how it would have first been read.

[Hekate]

8. When I was in high school in the 60s I read the thing twice and disliked it both times...

The first time was because it was supposed to be such a fantastic and insightful book. I hated it -- but decided maybe it was because I wasn't a boy.

Sometime after that my mom and my then-boyfriend sat around talking about how they both loved it and what a fantastic and insightful book it was. So I decided maybe I'd missed the point and read it again.

Goddam, as Holden would say, I still hated it.

Hekate

[XemaSab]

9. That was one of the few books in high school that I actually liked

Dickens? Notsomuch. x(

[elleng]

12. Liked Franny and Zooey

.

[REP]

dupe

[REP]

13. I hated it, too, for its false and whiny voice

Struck me as a middle-aged man trying to sound like a teen. Which it was.

[LibDemAlways]

14. Your post is timely. My daughter just

finished reading it a month ago. Her reaction was totally unlike that of the majority of her 10th grade classmates who found Holden "too judgmental" and "overly critical."

She found his candor refreshing and told the teacher that his descriptions of his peers reminded her of her classmates -mean and phony.

I reread the book after 40 years and I still admire Holden. He had a lot of insight into human nature and wisdom way beyond his years. (Of course because he was the thinly veiled, much older JD Salinger.)

[Why Syzygy]

15. I like it ..

I've read it at least two or three times, and even read the whole thing out loud to a boyfriend who had not read it.

It's pathos exactly because he never gets himself together. It's one of my all time favorites, actually. I liked all the classics, Dickens, Steinbeck, Bronte (I wrote my senior term paper on the Bronte sisters). I'm with the teachers on this one.

Catcher in the Rye is a perfect segue into Vonnegut.

[Berry Cool]

16. Everybody finds something in literature boring.

I, for one, can't stand Gertrude Stein and her annoying repetitiveness, even though I know it's done on purpose and for effect.

I think part of what today's teenagers don't like about Holden is that he's "dated," and he was already "dated" when I read about him in the '70s. Thing was, I was willing to accept that he was a '40s teenager (doesn't the book start in '47 or '48?) and that thus he had some marked and distinctive differences from '70s teens. (If he didn't, he wouldn't be a realistic teenager--nothing gets dated faster than teenage fashion, teenage slang, teenage music, etc. I didn't EXPECT a '40s teenager to dress, talk and act like one of my own era.) Also, I understood he was rich and way better off in life than someone like me, but I didn't hold that against him as a reason he had "nothing to be upset about." I approached him even then as a teenager whose feelings I would be open to as I read about him, however much he was or wasn't like me personally, however reliable or unreliable he was as a narrator about the supposed terribleness of his plight, focusing on the one universal thing about him: the teenage angst.

Somehow I doubt teens don't feel angst anymore. I find it hard to believe they don't whine anymore. I find it hard to believe that all the wealthy well-off ones realize today how fortunate they are compared to other people. I find it hard to believe all this stuff has been Prozaced away, or that all teenagers think it capable of being Prozaced away.

I have always assumed we will always have weird, immature, whiny, overprivileged teenagers amongst us who feel as if they have lost some sort of emotional purity they had when they were young, and regret it, and that they lost it to the big bad world out there, and they regret that, and who fail to appreciate the good fortune they do have.

What this article implies is that today's teenagers just loooove the world they're living in, see no flaws in it and are essentially angst-free (except, maybe, for the angst of whether they'll get into College X or have enough money to buy this or that). This may be so, but then again, that's what most teenagers were probably like in the late '40s and early '50s. That's why a character like Holden Caulfield stands out. That's why he's interesting for an author to write about. There's not much story to writing about the others. In that sense I'm not surprised he appealed more to the average teen of the '60s than he does now, because in the '60s it was HIP to be a Holden. But if kids today have a hope of appreciating him, they will have to do it by starting out not assuming that he is either like them or has to be like them in order to be worth reading about.

[Why Syzygy]

20. The teens quoted

are indulging in a bit of whining themselves.

[raccoon]

17. I read it at my college roommate's recommendation (late 1960's)

and I thought it was boring.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

22. I read it in 1967 and hated it, just as I hated A Separate Peace

Oh, and I hated Street Rod, too, which we were forced to read in ninth grade.

[devilgrrl]

36. I couldn't stand 'A Separate Peace' - talk about whiney preppies

I refer to it as 'George H.W. Bush School Days'

[gbate]

23. I liked the premise and I thought the character of Holden was interesting.

[WCGreen]

24. I like Fanny and Zoey....

[stray cat]

25. I read it about 30 years ago and thought he was spoiled and whiny then

I never thought of him as a force for change because all he ever did was whine and talk.

[Scout]

26. read it a looooooong time ago, and didn't see what all the fuss was about...

spoiled whiny brat, that Holden.

[libguy9560]

27. I love that book

I wonder if it was the book that inspired Taxi Driver

[litlady]

28. Reading that book in h.s. nearly made me hate reading...

but luckily the other dozens of books I read made up for it and I ended up being an English teacher. :)

[Joe Chi Minh]

29. What a sad commentary on recent generations. It's why you don't have pop songs remotely approaching

the beauty and originality, indeed, intelligibility of those of the fifties and sixties.

The younger generations today have been conditioned by the empty consumerist values propagated by the large corporations. But who can blame them? It's been the quick and the dead these past few decades. The "hippie" life-style of the yester-year is hardly an option.

In those days, the conservatives were hypocrites, paying some kind of tribute to virtue. Today's conservatives simply miss out the middle-man, so the young people don't have the hypocrisy to rail against any more. Their idealism has gone from injured to absent. They just have to join the Gadarene rush, snouts in the trough - or they'll be trampled under foot, like so many are today. Read Joe Bageant's blog. In my view, The Catcher in the Rye is a classic among classics.

[Orrex]

30. These kids today with their MTV

[pitohui]

31. well we hear people's internal monologues ("whining" if you must) so it's no longer fresh

i don't think a child today, brought up on oprah and springer and the confessional society, can bring the same eyes to the book that it had back in the day

back then, there was more of a culture of keeping your internal monologue/thoughts/whining to yourself -- a stiff upper lip sort of thing

it wasn't widely put about that guys had much internal monologue or ability to whine

holden didn't mean so much because he was a great guy or a hero, he meant so much because his thoughts, shameful and whiny and superficial as they might be, were spilled out on the page for you to share

honestly, without putting on the game face

maybe there is no longer a need for "the catcher in the rye," some books are of their place and time

these days, we have more of everyone's internal monologue than we could have ever imagined, there is nothing fresh or new about a frank expression of teen angst or middle aged angst or hell anybody's angst, nobody keeps anything to themselves any more and even "goddam" is quaint, because no one even represses their "fuck yous"

the book was a good book in its day and some kid or another is bored by any/all of the classics but maybe this one is truly dated?

as far as the LANGUAGE is dated, well, too bad so sad, you can't enjoy any novel if you can't handle the fact that language grows, changes, and evolves, the language of any novel published more than a few years ago is inevitably dated in small (sometimes large) ways because the times move so fast -- you either accept this or if you don't accept it then you're not going to much enjoy reading literature, might as well just stick to the newest must see teevee

[Joe Chi Minh]

33. No. I don't think you get it at all, if you think his thoughts were superficial.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The empty materialism of this corporate-driven, consumerist society of today was his looming nightmare. He thought the shallow hypocrisy of the Establishment of the time, was as close to the Abyss as a society could get, little realising that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king: that the tribute vice paid to virtue, in his day, through its hypocrisy, was better than the full-speed ahead, blind, unabashed amorality of our world of today.

[pitohui]

37. i think you have placed your reply to the wrong comment EOM

,

[Jim__]

32. "Shut up and take your Prozac."

That response from high school students says a lot more about us than it does about "Catcher in the Rye."

[Dulcinea]

35. Yeah...

...why be angry or upset about anything when you can take a pill, be happy & conform?

[wicked stepsister]

34. thank you - someone had to say it!

I hated that book. Read it in early high school, and each time I go back to it I find something new to despise.

[pitohui]

38. "each time i go back to it i find something new to despise"????

and yet you go back

me, if i don't like a book, there are a million books in the world still waiting for me to read and i ain't getting any younger, i don't give do overs to books i despise

there is something abt the book that captures your attention or you wouldn't keep returning to the well

[Quantess]

41. "wicked stepsister" is now the granite stepsister. n/t

[Quantess]

39. I read it on my own, by choice, and I liked it.

These kids today. Don't they have teachers who force them to read drudgery like "Jude The Obscure"? Then they'd really have a book to complain about.

"...we don’t really speak this way..." Hamlet, Romeo, and Juliet don't speak that way, either. Clearly, these teens are at least as "whiny" as Holden Caufield.

[pitohui]

40. i loved "jude the obscure!"

i must truly be a sick puppy!!!

[Joe Chi Minh]

42. It was sensationally original in a stikingly human way, but, while laced with

side-splitting humour, the one sovereign, constant leit motif of the book was compassion.

Whining is when you grizzle for your own injured self-interest. Holden's injured idealism is a healthy characteristic of young people - even though they learn later in life that the adult world imposes a lot of compromises on people, and they themselves will become part of the problem for a new generation of idealistic young sprogs to wax bitterly over. I remember Holden's sight of two nuns made him hanker for this innocence he could see being pushed out of the picture all around him.

Since the beginning of he eighties, due to the baneful influence of the far right and the far left, young people, on the whole, have simply skipped those years. No more reason for exuberant celebrations of life, so no more of the great, lyrical pop songs of the fifties and sixties.

[mitchum]

43. They would probably like it much more if Holden were a hunky vampire

[LWolf]

45. +1,000

:rofl:

[DavidDvorkin]

44. I finally tried to read it recently

Never got around to it before. I gave up after a few pages.

I'm in my 60s, but I think I would have hated it when I was a teenager.

[old mark]

46. I never was able to finish it. Still haven't, and I guess I won't at this late date.

I thought it was very "cute" and literarily conscious.

mark

[HelenWheels]

47. My son has to read it

I just bought a copy for him so he can highlight and write in it.

[Jade Fox]

48. "Catcher" first captured the voice of adolescence......

I think that is why the book had such an impact.

That the voice of adolescence has changed since the 1940s can hardly be a surprise.

Just MHO

[Onceuponalife]

49. This is one of my favorite books

Thought it was hilarious. Few books have made me laugh so hard. I gave it to my friend at work. He loved it so much he bought all of Salinger's other books and then gave them to me when he was finished with them. I guess we were about in our mid-thirties then, having come of age in the seventies and early eighties. I enjoyed all of Salinger's books, may he rest in peace. I guess it's a mileage may vary kind of thing.

I certainly wouldn't have wanted Holden to dope himself up on anti-depressants!