The catcher in the rye - a book I am going to get my children to read once they are born and become teenagers

Helloz my blog! Nice to see you after my long hiatus. I will tell you all that I have been upto sometime else. Today I just finished reading a book called "The catcher in the rye". I enjoyed it throughly, so I think I'll talk about that first.

It has a very distinctive type of narration wherein it seems the author is literally speaking out a story to the reader. Like he's a friend or something. He mentioned in the book that he likes the books which after you finish, you wish you knew the author and you could call him and talk to him anytime you wished. And I feel exactly the same right now! Though I din't exactly find the book live upto the hoopla around its fame. Neverthless, i liked it at a different level. It very finely captures the confusion, the loneliness, fears and demons of a teenager and I could almost relate to it.

It reminded me of my high school time when I felt disgusted by the "phonies" around me. Some of the phony teachers and students I went to high school with. I remember I was about 15 and I had this physics teacher who was one of the biggest phonies of my time. Like all of us, often he was in a situation where he was asked questions way out of his league. And instead and admitting that he doesn't know it, he would give the students absolutely lame excuses like"I am very busy today, can u see me next week". He was so phony that I must admit that sometimes I actually did dig out some really tough problems which I knew were totally out of his league and took them to him just to put him in an embarassing situation and hear his new excuse :) I know that's bad but that look on his face was hard to resist ! lol!!!

Anyway, what I mean to say is that I wish I had read the book sooner in my life probably it could have eased the loneliness and confusion of my teenage. I am mentioning the following lines which I particularly appreciated very much for the beauty of the idea and the simplicity of the language. Its an advise every teenager and young adult should heed:

Mr. Vinson (a professor) saying to Holden Cauldfield (the young author) emphasising the importance of education and school and how he should not keep flunking tests all the time:

"I think that one of these days," he said, "you're going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you've got to start going there. But immediately. You can't afford to lose a minute. Not you...... " Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them--if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry." He stopped and took a big drink out of his highball. Then he started again. Boy, he was really hot. I was glad I didn't try to stop him or anything. "I'm not trying to tell you," he said, "that only educated and scholarly men are able to contribute something valuable to the world. It's not so. But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they're brilliant and creative to begin with--which, unfortunately, is rarely the case--tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end. And--most important--nine times out of ten they have more humility than the unscholarly thinker... "Something else an academic education will do for you. If you go along with it any considerable distance, it'll begin to give you an idea whatsize mind you have. What it'll fit and, maybe, what it won't. After a while, you'll have an idea what kind of thoughts your particular size mind should be wearing. For one thing, it may save you an extraordinary amount of time trying on ideas that don't suit you, aren't becoming to you. You'll begin to know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly."

I also liked this sentence:

'The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one"

So true! Aint it!!!