Reading "The Catcher in the Rye" - by Hénock Gugsa

/// Reading "The Catcher in the Rye" /// by Hénock Gugsa
===================== Back in high-school, in my teenage days, I never got around to reading J D Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye".  I'm sure many of my friends and acquaintances have read it and probably came away with some lasting impression of one sort or another.

I don't exactly know why I have never read it.  Probably, it was because I was more drawn to other books or activities.

Well,  now I am in my later years for sure; and I am determined to challenge myself to accomplish the things that I remember I never bothered to do from start to finish.  So, I have started and actually I'm two-thirds of the way reading this iconoclastic book.  To be sure,  many readers and critics have hailed it as the greatest literary exposition on America's youthful angst and self-torture.

Although, I haven't finished reading the book yet, my impressions and opinions of the leading character are already negative and  unsympathetic.  I must also confess that it has been well over three months since I borrowed the book from the library ....  I've already extended the loan three times!
 
The reason it is taking me so long, I suspect, is because I've found the book so depressing.  The main character, Holden Caulfield, is such a self-centered, egoistical, nihilist that it is very difficult to see any redeeming quality in him.  He is such a snot about everything and everybody (including sometimes himself) that you want to slap him, or walk away from him in disgust.  I know there is an irony here, and it is that I am beginning to think and sound like him.  And, this probably is the great lure of the character, and of course of the author himself.  I can say without reservation that Mr. Salinger's genius is that he has packed all this insight about alienation, frustration, and rebellion in the person of a lone young man who is undergoing serious growing pains.

In conclusion, I promise I will bravely finish reading this classic book.  I have to find out the meaning behind the title: "The Catcher in the Rye".  And maybe after that, I will think of tackling "Moby Dick"....  That was required reading in my English class at ERHS.  I think Mrs. Barrett expected  the class to read it completely, over one single week-end!

But what about my social life, Teacher?!!! 

== Postscript :  I did eventually finish reading the book.  I now declare that I am proud I did ! ==