Well… after almost 2 months, I finally finish The Catcher In The Rye, not because it is a large novel and certainly not because I’m a slow reader, no, it’s just because I really and honestly couldn’t get into it… I found I couldn’t decide if he was just a privileged kid in need of directions or if he was just an annoying teenager going through puberty… in both instances he ended up sounding like a real whiner to me, a phony. Poor little rich kid.

I didn’t like it. I really didn’t. (that’s my homage to the novel, as well as the phony remark above.)

I continued reading it because I had been led to believe how great a novel it was and having gone to French school this was not part of our curriculum, so now, in my quest to read the great American novels of yesteryear, I finally got to it… I felt let down, I really thought there was going to be this big exploding finish… it got interesting only when he came home to talk to his younger sister and then ran away again to his old teacher… Maybe if I had read it 30 years ago when I was in my teens when no one really did things like this yet, I might have been impressed, but nowadays, what teenager hasn’t run away from home for a couple of days and bummed around town, it’s in the news all the time… It felt too common for today’s era.

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