I was worried as hell about reading this book again. The last time I read it was about a thousand years ago when I was just a kid. I was lousy with angst just like good old Holden back then. I really was. Now that I’m a crummy old guy I figured that I wouldn’t like it anymore. That’s the one thing about crummy old guys, they always hate books that kids like. Every time I reread a corny book that I really liked when I was a kid it makes me want to give the writer a buzz and ask what the hell is going on. It’s like they are trying to give you the time in the back of a cab when you don’t feel like getting the time at all. It’s damn depressing, I swear to God it is. If you want to know the truth, you probably couldn’t even talk to a phony writer on the phone. You would just end up talking to his butler or some snobbish person like that and asking if they would give the writer your message. He probably wouldn’t even do it. The thing with guys like that is that they will never give writers your messages. That’s something that annoys the hell out of me. Turns out this is still a damn good book. Salinger kid is a great writer. He really is. Maybe I’m still just an angst-ridden sonuvabitch, but this part kills me: “All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she’d fall off the goddam horse, but I didn’t say anything or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it’s bad if you say anything to them.”p.211 I’ll bet everyone is going to think that I’m just horsin’ around or trying to be all sexy talking like this. The reason for this corny review is because a thousand other people have already written reviews for this book and I’ll bet that they have already said everything that I want to say. It’s pretty depressing. It really is. That’s about all that I’m going to talk about. Now I just hope that no one writes “fuck you” on this review. That’s the thing with some people, they are always sneaking up and writing “fuck you” on your book reviews when you are not looking. They really are.

I paraphrase the best comment I ever read about *The Catcher in the Rye* whenever it comes up on reddit: the most bitter irony of it is that a book about a kid searching for someone to listen falls on so many deaf ears.

He's lost and scared. And in that context, his parents putting him into a psych hospital for a year for getting lost and scared one weekend, really tells us about the environment in which he lives. He doesn't even understand the concept of nurturing well enough to vocalize that is what he wants to give and receive. He's fumbling for those terms, but the best he can come up with is the idea of not letting children fall off a cliff.

He wants to know whats going to happen to him now that winter is going and he has nowhere to go, just like the ducks.

Probably the most interesting thing about the book is that American society has changed around it to such an extent that what was a book which would could get a teacher fired if they assigned it to their class, for fear that it would put corrupting ideas into their heads, has become something that is assigned to classes in the hope that it will diffuse their adolescent angst by showing them how shallow and tedious that angst is.