Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot.”

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

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I like to read a couple of classic novels every year, just to hit some of the famous books that I somehow missed in school or life. I guess The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger is one that many high school students read, but was somehow never assigned to me. It also has such an odd title that I didn’t have much incentive to pick it up on my own after high school. I’m not sure what finally spurred me on to read it […]

Holden Caulfield is the Worst

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

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This is a book that I feel like I should have read years ago, but somehow I missed that lesson in school. It’s one of those books that is referenced a lot in pop culture so I felt it was time for me to familiarize myself with the source material. It’s funny, after the first page, I thought, “I like this guy! He’s entertaining to listen to.” That lasted maybe…10 pages? If that? I gotta tell you, Holden Caulfield got old REAL fast. I realized […]

What in the world is the purpose of this book? I am genuinely curious.

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This review will contain spoilers, so if you want to avoid knowing all the details of the sparse and meaningless plot, maybe skip the first couple of paragraphs. Holden Caulfield is a self-important, spoiled and worthless little shit. At the start of the book, he is cooling his heels at the fourth boarding school he’s been expelled from because he just can’t be bothered to even try to apply himself (having failed four out of five subjects completely), and generally bitching about how phony his […]

Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy.

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Half Cannonball! Somehow, I escaped high school without ever having read The Catcher in the Rye. I’m not sure how, since it feels like we read every other book in the world. Maybe the nuns weren’t crazy about old Holden Caulfield. And strangely, while I have always been aware of Holden, I never really knew his story. So I embarked on what is arguably Salinger’s best known, and most divisive, work without having any idea what to expect. The novel opens just before Christmas, with […]



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