Finished it last night. So depressing*. I hadn’t read anything about it before except knew John Hinckley and Mark Chapman were fans. My summary written at 3am: “Am amazing study of someone who feels crap all the time.”
While checking how to spell Hinckley, I just found this post that says serial killers have great taste in literature. Dunno if I’ll read Stranger in a Strange Land.
I didn’t realise Holden had ended up in an institution at the end – I just thought they had a psychoanalyst at his next school. And that he just “got sick” as a temporary thing. A bit disappointing.
Fave bits:
“Boy, I really fouled that up. I should’ve at least made it for cocktails or something.”
“People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I’d play it in the goddam closet.” [NB: subjunctive.]
“And you could tell his date wasn’t even interested in the goddam game, but she was even funnier-looking than he was, so I guess she had to listen. Real ugly girls have it tough. I feel so sorry for them sometimes.”
“Which always kills me. I’m always saying ‘Glad to’ve met you’ to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”
“If you think I was dying to see him again, you’re crazy.”
“Newsreels. Christ Almighty. There’s always a dumb horse race, and some dame breaking a bottle over a ship, and some chimpanzee riding a goddam bicycle with pants on.”
“You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they’re mean bastards at heart. I’m not kidding.”
“… I’d meet this beautiful girl that was also a deaf-mute and we’d get married. She’d come to live in my cabin with me, and if she wanted to say anything to me, she’d have to write it on a goddam piece of paper, like everybody else.”
“I know more damn perverts, at schools and all, than anybody you ever met, and they’re always being perverty when I’m around.”
*Not as depressing as The Game by Neil Strauss, though it’s a great read.
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