The catcher in the Rye.

.The catcher in the Rye.

Can a book be more engaging than this? It is a narrative , a young boy of seventeen describing about 3 days in his life. When he is about to be thrown out of a school for failing all subjects except English. He hates almost everything and the book is all about his adventures and misadventures from the trip to home in New York, meeting a class mate's mom in the train and trying to get her have a drink with you!, finding a cheap hotel, getting fleeced by a pimp and chatting a prostitute when depressed and lonely.
More importantly the novel is about doing what you love doing in life and not giving a damn about what the world thinks.
Salinger is very good at the pace he maintains, even though the book has so many characters with truck loads of nostalgia. I almost think there was huge part of my life in this book.
So many characters, but our narrator Holden Caulfield has some thing interesting about him. He is young, handsome and either he is someone who knows what he exactly wants from life or a really confused guy. The vocabulary is very natural and the opinions our narrator has about some people, for example the ivy league bastards is exactly what i have about them.
I know now why so many people like this book , it is not boring even for a second, it is a ride in our narrator's life. The incidents want you keep coming back, rereading the book till it becomes your favourite book. I guess that is what happened to me too.
It kills me, when a book like this is written in such simple language and such a strong hold over the characters, i can read this hundred times before the end of this year and not be bored.
I love Phoebe, Holden's sister, i love Sally too, she is just a typical girl friend isn't she? I love Holden's mom, just like my mom, she can wake up when someone coughs in Siberia.
This book reminds me of a cool movie i watched recently, Donnie Darko.
If you get a chance get a hardcover edition of this book and don't buy a paperback, cause you will end up reading it many times and hardback's survive the weathering.