“I am highly concerned about the tweeter who picked Holden Caulfield as the fictional character they’d most like to marry. Do you really think he’d make good husband material? Because I don’t. But put him alongside Christian Grey, or Legolas, or Edward Cullen – all other suggestions as the #FictionalCharactersIWantToMarry hashtag became one of the top trending topics on Twitter yesterday – and he starts to look a better option. At least Holden’s not a violent sadist, or a vampire, or an elf. And he does love his sister.”

From “Want to marry a fictional character? You could do so much better.” in The Guardian.

benkling:

High School Lit Valentines.

You can buy them here.

“To what book does he sometimes turn in the middle of the night when he can’t sleep? He turns to The Catcher in the Rye. If literature can’t save your life, he suggests, then it can at least make it easier to survive.”

- John Glassie in The New Republic. “How Literature Saved this Book” a review of David Shield’s How Literature Saved My Life.

Image source here.

(via sonuvabitcholden)

From:

Three Years After J.D. Salinger’s Death, What to Make of Holden Caulfield?

Strand Book Store in NYC is doing it right.

A new J.D. Salinger film and biography are being billed as an unprecedented look into the mysterious life of the author of The Catcher In the Rye.

Simon & Schuster announced Tuesday that it had acquired The Private War of J.D. Salinger, an oral biography compiled by author David Shields and filmmaker-screenwriter Shane Salerno, whose screenplay credits include the Oliver Stone film Savages.

- TIME, January 2013

It wasn’t till early adolescence that I saw the point of books and then it was the old stalwart, “The Catcher in the Rye,” that got me going. 

- Alain de Botton, New York Times Book Review: By the Book 

Happy (belated) birthday Mr. Salinger.

Kevin Smokler at The Millions on re-reading Catcher as an adult:

I missed Allie the first 10 times I read Catcher and focused on what everyone else did: That Holden Caufield is a brat, perhaps the ur-pain-in-the-ass-surly teenager to bond with or recoil from. But that stereotype didn’t really exist in the mid 1940s when Salinger conceived of him while enlisted as a soldier, a young man just a bit older than Holden when we witnessed handfuls of his friends die in battle. Holden helped birth the surly-teen generation (he arrived a good few years before rock n’ roll, the panic over juvenile delinquency and Rebel Without a Cause) but came from the one before, who knew the refrain of “please don’t let me die” from Normandy and Dunkirk.

Emphasis mine.

Read all of A Year in Reading: The Catcher in the Rye.