…all joking aside.
I never saw the point..or anything else in.. “The Catcher in the Rye”.
I made several attempts at it but it just bored me to tears.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8084931.stm
Might be a cultural. born there, thing..maybe not.
I just don’t get it.
I’m open to suggestions as to why not…
Slan,
D. 
I was never into it, really. It’s right up there with Moby Dick for me. But that was years ago, so I might pick it up again, again. Just to see. It’s not like I have anything else to do 
I read it in 9th grade, as a requirement. I did not enjoy it, and found the main character aggravating.
I don’t know why it’s considered such great literature and it’s been years since I read the book but I do remember how the book so perfectly showed what pitiful sad creatures teenage boys without direction and guidance can be. I remember having to take quite a few extra showers while reading that book because it just made me feel so grimy and dirty like Holden’s greasy acne skin somehow got all over me too. And I would have liked Holden to have taken a good soaking bath too.
I read it for the first time just last year-part of my decision to read some so-called “great works”
I thought it was a terrific waste of time. One of the worst I’ve read in quite a while. Perhaps it’s point was to show how pathetic is the male teenage condition. Or, perhaps the style of writing and the subject at the time it was first published accounts for the fame?? I am clueless as to why anyone would like this book.
All I came away with was that nothing happened- I kept thinking something had to happen by the end, but no, nothing. Oh, and I hated the irritating repetitious way it was written.
At least the weird book I’m reading now- Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk- strange as it is, has lots of surprises, has an interesting writing style… and I certainly don’t think it will end up on anyone “classic” list…
My biggest reading surprise this year (so far) has been Jane Eyre. I was determined it was going to be horrid because I hated Wuthering Heights (different sister, yes, but I’d heard they had similar styles). But I absolutely adored Jane Eyre. I loved Charlotte Bronte’s style, and I adored Jane. Very much a heroine after my own heart in many ways.
Yes, that was a hijack. Oops 
An English professor encouraged me to read Catcher just before he flunked me. Told me I desperately needed some direction and this was one of the books to read to get it. It was a recently published work then and I still haven’t read it. Perhaps I should have but I got direction from another source.
Sandy
I re-read Catcher a few years ago and liked it fairly well but didn’t see what all the fuss was about.
I do remember that when I first read it, it was the first time I had ever seen “the F word” in print and that made a bit of an impression on me.
That book is just like my life. I think I have been through everything in that book, even punched by a pimp.
i wonder why Mark Chapman was so into it?
One of my high school English teachers dropped the book from the course, after one of her brilliant young students ran away from home after reading it.
I don’t think I have read it.
If you want an atmospheric evocation of teenage weltschmertz and up-yer-own-backsidedness, then Catcher in the Rye is yer book.
If you want a story with a beginning, middle and end, it is not.
The question is, why does anyone want an atmospheric evocation of teenage weltschmertz and up-yer-own-backsidedness? There doesn’t seem to be any shortage of it in real life. Maybe those English professors thought that they themselves had got past that stage, and maybe they had not.
My daughter read it for an independent study project in 7th grade (I remember I had to sign a release for her to read it!). She really liked it, and identified strongly with Holden Caufield (which is kind of scary, when you think of it).
The project was on teen rebellion, if I recall correctly. She also had to watch “Rebel Without a Cause.”
Redwolf
I read it in college, and didn’t care for it either. Maybe it was because I was over my own teen angst, but I felt like Holden was, for lack of a better term, a douchebag.
I read it later in life and didn’t care for it, but I was a conformer and probably wouldn’t have liked it as a teen either. Having said that, I think it’s a great book and even though I didn’t like it I could recognize it for it’s literary value. Really well written, great character development, powerful theme.
I think it speaks better to kids of a certain age and especially who tend to be rebellious and questioning and unsettled. Just because it didn’t speak to me doesn’t mean it doesn’t speak.
No book is for everyone. I read it and enjoyed it back in the day, but it wasn’t a religious experience, and I’ve certainly felt no need to go on and read everything else he’s ever published.
That said, I do recognise it as a ground-breaking book. Salinger wrote for (and of) an audience that no one was writing for at the time. He’s from the pre-boomer generation, but he was writing about teenage angst right at the time that teenagers were being invented.
“The time that teenagers were being invented”?
I dispute that. If you want a more amusing depiction of a teenager, from earlier in English (language) Fiction, try Lupin Pooter in George and Weedon Grossmith’s “Diary of a Nobody”.
And if you are talking about teenagers in fact, then what were the apprentice boys of Derry, but teenagers in all but name?
Hamlet? Teenager.
Now there’s a thought
Slan,
D. 
I think y’all have hit on something here.
“Teenagers” of not that long ago, were adults with the skills and responsibilities that adulthood brings- working, self-supporting, , marrying, raising a family.
By what we now consider middle age, many were at or nearing the end of the road.
Most had neither the luxury of time thanks to parents willing to pamper them along in an extended childhood. Some were lucky if they even had a few short years of what we would consider childhood.
So there! Catcher in the Rye should have been a warning: 
"Here is what happens when them young’uns ain’t put out to hard work asap- Trouble. "
Sociology will tell you that one of the characteristics of our era is that of prolonged adolescence.