Original Source: Cassette Tape
Quality: Good


Book Description
================

Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield 
has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story 
of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been 
expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and 
keeps this novel on banned book lists. It begins,

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably 
want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, 
and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all 
that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into 
it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores 
me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages 
apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them." 

His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers 
to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the 
essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation.

(I really enjoyed reading this book when I was at high school. I hope 
someone else out their like it too.)


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