I started reading Franny and Zooey on Sunday because I thought it was short enough to read in the few days that I have left before school starts. I LOVE J.D. Salinger... I've read The Catcher in the Rye about 10 times... not exaggerating! I used to read it every year over Christmas break. That's a love or hate book. Some people just do not like that style of writing, and therefore dismiss it. I, however, love it and wish to build Salinger a shrine.... ok... that's a bit much.
Franny and Zooey is A LOT different. I still really like it, but it is not anything like Catcher in the Rye. This book is really funny at times. I was reading at Starbucks today, for example, and I literally laughed out loud and had to put my hand over my mouth. Yes... people looked at me. I don't care. I was wearing a t-shirt that said I survived the zombie uprising... it's not like they were going to take me seriously anyway, right? :)
I'm not finished yet, I've got about 70 pages to go-- planning on cranking those out tomorrow. But it's super good. It's a dark humor that I really like. I would compare it to Kurt Vonnegut who is friggin' hysterical!
I love how when he writes he almost sounds like he's praising people until you really listen to what he's saying. On the first page of the book he's talking about a bunch of college guys standing around and says that they were "talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries." I only wish that I could insult people with such elegance! :)
One of my favorite lines so far in the book is when the narrator is talking about the family-- they had zillions of kids, all who were super smart and appeared on some radio show. Salinger writes, "Public response to the children was often hot and never tepid. In general, listeners were divided into two, curiously restive camps; those who held that the Glasses were a bunch of insufferably 'superior' bastards that should have been drowned at birth, and those who held that they were bona-fide underage wits and savants, of an uncommon, if unenviable, order."
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!
A great read! The first section is a bit slow, but it picks up after a while! Can't wait to finish it.
That's one of my favorite books! Salinger is brilliant. 'Nough said. Have you read 9 Stories? I haven't finished it, but the first story is fantastic. It's great. His other book, Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, and Seymour, an Introduction, wasn't as good, in my opinion. Seymour was just depressing. I still enjoyed reading it, just because of his style of writing!
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