No. Holden is still a twat. Though Wankler is right as to how the book ought to be taught. Catcher is always exhibit 1 in my list of books that should really only be read in class. About 15 years ago I went back and revisited the high school canon from the perspective of a 40-year old. The winners: The Great Gatsby Rockinghorse Winner The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock Heart of Darkness The Losers: Lord of the Flies Catcher in the Rye Moby Dick (Melville desperately needed an editor) Of Mice and Men (so very hard to read when I knew the outcome) Unchanged: To Kill a Mockingbird (still great) Romeo and Juliet (still blah) Their Eyes were Watching God (still great) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (meh)
Catcher In The Rye was banned from the curriculum in my school district. And the school library. Too saucy, I guess. I grew up in Jesusistan. I also read that they have now banned Harry Potter books (but not because of JK Rowling's views on trans rights.)
Don't Hide The Madness: William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg, conversations which run the gambit from high level and interesting literary and cultural matters to a couple of old guy talking about their health. Not bad, but I'm glad it's a library book
1Q84 ~ H. Murakami I finished this up yesterday. I think I need a break from Murakami, because I kind of hated this book. The biggest problem for me is that his male protagonists have become villains without his acknowledgement of such. They're all aloof artists who are characterized as mature by their love of classical music and ability to cook themselves simple meals. They're actually just immature man-children who use the dream worlds that used to be interesting in his novels to rape and impregnate non-consenting women. The male lead is the worst. Yet, the interesting female lead and every other female character in the book spend the entire second half of the book pining over him. That's not even addressing that the book just fizzles out without any resolution. It definitely feels like it was written as a serial and at some point Murkami got bored and just ended it.
We Don't Live Here Anymore: Collected Short Stories and Novellas, Volume One the first two books, consisting of fifteen stories and three novellas published by Andre Dubus in the 60s and 70s. This is the first of three volumes of his collected fiction. Dubus is often called "a writer's writer" and "The American Chekhov," which is bullshit. Chekhov is the Russian Dubus. Just kidding. They're both great.
I've heard the same said about John Williams. Stoner is in my top 3 fictions of all time. Williams would have been an all time great if he only had a more interesting name.* *I literally just had to google his name because I couldn't remember it. And he's one of my favorite writers.
The other Duhigg book, and it might be better than the first. His main idea when starting was motivation, but it drifts into time management, goal setting, data absorption, etc. Duhigg feels both chronologically and conceptually like he's the middle point between David Allen and Cal Newport in my own productivity journey.
I'm a bit of a Jill Lepore stan. She's a stylish prose writer, with an interesting eye for structure. And a very distinctive voice. I enjoy her podcast a lot. So as I *read* her book, I'm *hearing* her inside my brain. I don't think that's ever happened to me before.
Actually now that I think about it, I kind of had the same sensation when I read fellow podcaster/historian Mike Duncan's last book, The Storm Before The Storm. But his voice and style are less distinctive so it wasn't like he was inside my skull reading to me.
Re: googling. I was blanking on a similar writer who was associated with San Francisco/Marin County, but who wrote definitive LA novels about the film industry, as well as a great novel about SF's literary scene c. mid-to-late Sixties, and I couldn't remember his name to save my life. When that happens, I try to avoid search engines to give my brain practice at retreiving hard to find memories. And sure enough, on my way to take a leak around 2:30 this morning. . . Don Carpenter. His reputation was done in by his common name and by his ability to write a broad range of fiction, from Hollywood novels (ACouple of Comedians and others) prison/noir (Hard Rain Falling) and books about artists and writers (Fridays at Enricos, incomplete by one chapter at his death, completed by Jonathan Lethem, who found the task of completing the book to be a gut-wrenching, sleep-killing ordeal, such was his admiration for Carpenter). If there are any Amazon cards the future for us, I'll use it to get Stoner.
Or he could have been given a nickname like the other NBA player named John Williams in that era: "His girth earned him the nickname "Hot Plate" Williams"
I didn't care much for RP1. The deification of 1980s computer gaming culture was a bit too much for me. And, the perspective on women was pathetic, IMO.
Back to reading a bit after taking the pandemic off. Weird, I know. So many folks looked at it as a time to revel in reading and I understand that. But, for me, no story could compete with the story we are living. Any attempt at drama pales in comparison. Humor seems wrong-footed. But, I opened this Christmas gift last night and am finding it pretty engaging. It's steeped in some of the currently boiling drama while not literally about it. So, it's interesting, a life I have no concept of in my background. It opens by describing how he and all of his siblings' birth certificates had at least one significant error on them (his first name was misspelled as Danial), an indication of a system that genuinely didn't care about them enough to get it right.
The Hamlet - William Faulkner "He fled, not from his past, but to escape his future. It took him twelve years to learn you cannot escape either of them."
Rich Roll is a funny dude and a good writer. He's an exceptional athlete who turned his life around at a time that most wouldn't be able to. He's also a firm believer in every quack nutrition idea out there from superfoods to organic doesn't use pesticides. I ate an entirely vegan diet for 3 years, but thankfully never bought into that crap. Fun, inspirational read on the training and endurances sport side of things. Eye opening with raw honesty about his failings as a person up until middle age. Filled with quackery where he places caveats at every other word about how he's not a dietitian or nutritionist and then recites all the long disproven myths pushed by the Netflix food shockumentary crowd. I knew what I was getting into, so the food stupidity didn't bother me until the appendices. Well worth the read and, despite the nonsensical pseudoscience he spews, a few of the recipes are pretty tasty as I routinely make variations of them myself.
Either you know Seth Godin or you don't. Now that I listen to his podcast, I read his books in his voice with his odd delivery. This one is about figuring out why and when to quit, and then doing it. Typical Godin, easy read full of pithy comments. Read it in about 4 hours during the day.
There are two problems with teaching The Catcher in The Rye in class only. It was intended to be a funny book. Most readers go into books, especially in school, thinking literature can only be serious. They just aren't ready to laugh at anything. The tone of the book is one of frustration, which can be really funny at times. However, some people don't notice or care about tone. I do. Secondly, readers face difficulty when deciding if they like a book they HAVE to read versus one they choose to read. Required reading is automatically considered more of an uphill task than for pleasure. Also, hype doesn't always help a book that you simply MUST enjoy, and Catcher falls into that type of hype. Calling it a classic puts people on the defensive. I have never understood people who don't like this book. I've never thought of Holden as a twat, instead, probably the most interesting guy in the room. And I certainly never held his rich upbringing against him, because he doesn't act like it affected him. Holden spends most of his time criticizing certain behaviors in people and some people might feel threatened by that. In summary of his Holden's view, if life is a game, the winners are mostly fakers. Yeah, some game.
Not to say that Moby Dick was great, but Melville didn't want an editor, because he got paid by the word.