The media is filled today with stories about the impact that J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye<\/i> made on impressionable [mostly] young readers. For example, the co-hosts of NBC’s Today Show<\/i> shared their recollections of how the book affected them, with Matt Laurer stating that he remembered being proud that Catcher<\/i> was his first “real book.”<\/p>\n
I must be one of the few people in America who don’t have a similar story to share. I’m pretty sure I’ve read the book and I think we still have a copy somewhere in our home library, but frankly, it made absolutely no lasting impact on me. I can’t recall a single detail from Catcher<\/i> other than the name of the lead character, Holden Caufield. And all this talk about the author and the book has stimulated no desire whatsoever to find the book and [re]read it.<\/p>\n
A friend recently tagged me via Facebook for the “15 Books That Affected Me” meme. While I didn’t respond (Sorry, Joe; nothing personal, but I don’t do Facebook memes. I don’t do much of anything<\/i> Facebook, but that’s another story.), I did spend about thirty seconds thinking about it, and in light of today’s Catcher<\/i> lovefest, it seems appropriate to list at least a few books from my youth that did<\/i> stay with me.<\/p>\n
I was a big fan of science fiction as a kid, and while that ardor has cooled somewhat over the years, the books I remember most tend to come from that genre. Robert Heinlein’s New Agey (the term hadn’t been invented at that time, AFAIK) Stranger in a Strange Land<\/i> made an impact on me, as did Harlan Ellison’s short story collection, The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World<\/i>. And, of course, the list wouldn’t be complete without Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings<\/i> trilogy and its prequel, The Hobbit<\/i>. (And in the interests of complete transparency, there was that one summer when a copy of J. D. Southern’s scandalous novel Candy<\/i> circulated between beach towels at the Fort Stockton public swimming pool, the “best” passages easily found by their dogeared pages.)<\/p>\n
I wish I could point to more intellectually sophisticated reading material – and my reading habits really were more varied than they may seem – but there it is. Salinger and Catcher<\/i> may have shaped a generation, but I never got on that particular bus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The media is filled today with stories about the impact that J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye made on impressionable [mostly] young readers. For example, the co-hosts of NBC’s Today Show shared their recollections of how the book affected them, with Matt Laurer stating that he remembered being proud that Catcher was his first… Continue reading Forgetting J.D. Salinger<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-writing","category-society-culture","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}