what

?

Oh golly, it's been decades since I read this book. But I still remember the red hunting cap.

It took me a while to work out what this was, but yeah the red hunting cap is what gave it away for me too.

I know it's a sacred text to many but this quote always makes me think of Elmer Fudd.

um, by the way - that question mark was Miko's - this is one of my favorite books fwiw.

Duck season.

Oh, memories. I always wanted to like this book, but could not, quite. I read it too late, and had by that time sort-of-dated-but-mostly-been-benignly-stalked-by this crazy brilliant goddam kid who made it sound all too familiar as I read along, and I kept imagining the entire thing in his voice.

I had read it too late as well. I was put off by Holden's constant lying.

I always figure Holden Caulfield would have hated Catcher in the Rye.

qft.

My favourite Book of All time... Go, Holden, Go!

I hated that book when I read it in highschool but maybe I should re-read it with some perspective.

Yeah, I got to this book way too late as well. I just want to slap Holden upside the head and tell him to stop being such a....teenager.

I read it at 13. Perfect.

I liked the book, but I hated all the girls in high school who got huge crushes on Caulfield. I never thought he was supposed to be a heroic figure but I was definitely in the minority at the time.

Ah. Yeah, not one of my favorite books. I remember when we discussed it here a couple years ago - man did we have some good discussions at that point.

I didn't love it when I first read it...maybe 16-17? But it WAS a gateway to Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories, AND Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters (allow with Seymour, An Introduction) so...I still like the book. And I did re-read it a year or two ago. I liked it a lot more in my mid-thirties than I did in my teens.

Now, On the Road...that book was PERFECT to read at 17. It would seem I mentioned this in the thread Miko linked to as well! I recently listened to an audio book of On the Road, read by Matt Dillon. Pretty awesome too.

I read TCITR in my 30s, loved it, and just knew that the teenage me would have hated it had I read it back then.
OTR I read in my late 20s and was sad that I didn't read it earlier, when it could have had more influence.

When what was once new and daring becomes ordinary and square, non-historical American fiction loses its power.

I read it when I was about 17, and wasn't hugely impressed, but I'd already read 'Last Exit to Brooklyn' by then and was probably beyond corruption.

A surprising favorite amongst rather jaded Bronx teenagers, and a staple of my 11th grade American Literature curriculum. They love the part with the prostitute and Maurice.

Eh, you're all a bunch of phonies anyway.

I didn't like it at all when I first read it, but I think that when one is an angsty teen it cuts a bit too close to home. But when I re-read it later (and not much later, really) I got that. But all things considered I prefer Franny and Zooey.

I'm right with you richat, On the Road was a perfect teen read for me. I must have been 17 or 18 as well, just about to leave home and after reading that book I was raring to go. I ended up reading maybe a dozen or more of Kerouac's novels, but I have to say the only one I've ever gone back to was Dharma Bums.

I love Salinger, and though I re-read Franny and Zooey, Carpenters/Seymour, and Nine Stories with some regularity, it's been years since I re-read The Catcher in the Rye. It's time.

The copy on my shelf is the same copy I read then, with all the felt-tip underlinings and one scrawled marginal note: DUCKS!!! It's a little time capsule, for better or worse.

I didn't have the proverbial crush on Holden, but I remember thinking as a teenager how fatally easy it would be to have a crush on a guy like him -- so flip and funny and sad and broken. The book spoke to me, and still does, in ways I don't really want to dissect.

Incidentally, I read it a year or two before I went away to a (crappy) boarding school. This was perhaps not the best way to prime my mind for the situation. For the year that I spent at that rotten school full of phonies, on some level, I was always ready to pull on my hunting cap, pack my brand-new ice skates, count my dough, and get the hell out of there. The phonies were coming in the goddamned windows.