Rating: 
Summary: A book with no half-life.
Review: Catcher in the Rye is an extraordinary example of timeless literature, and though many would call the book pointless (rather than realistic) and refer to Holden as hypocritical (and not a teenager) I still find this book identifies with me as strongly as anyone from any other era, due to the realist/pessimistic views it displays from the teenage vantage point, rather than playing off the "best-years-of-your-life" cliché. There's far to much to place here about the book, the author, and the message, and I feel obligated to urge anyone who reads this to pick up everything Salinger you can get your hands on, because he is truly an amazing author, and has such a way with words that even in his latter writing years, you can still identify with him as if he were a friend writing from the room next to yours. Catcher is his only published novels, but his reprinted short stories (Franny and Zooey, Nine Stories, & Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters) are also gems. If you can find them, the 22 unpublished shorts are also great. There's really nothing a review can say that will show what you will learn and discover from this novel, and to attempt this would be pointless. Like Holden, I guess, we are all a little hypocritical.
Rating: 
Summary: An interesting book
Review: I have come to the conclusion that, no matter how good the book, when i am forced to read something for an english assignment, i never can never enjoy the author's writings. I am a sophomore and i was assigned Cather in the Rye earlier this year. I found the language whiny and aggrevating. However, when i reread the novel, i realized that my original opinion was incorrect. While Holden can become aggrevating with his over use of the word "phoney", he is a character that i think any teenager can relate with at some point in their life. As a teenager, i do relate with Holden and i can understand his resentment of change. I have come to realize that my first analysis of the book, was completley incorrect and i can now read cather in the rye and enjoy it!
Rating:
Summary: Stunning Novel For All Ages
Review: CATCHER IN THE RYE is an impressive American fiction. A novel as memorable and beautiful as anything you have read before. Written in 1951, it still is a fresh and fascinating book for all ages. Although marketed mainly for juvenile readers, the book really is an intelligent, serious literature containing every possible theme you can think of- a novella with the big picture. Holden Caulfield is a most intriguing, realistic character, and a literary figure anyone can relate to- certainly a character who will stay in your mind. He hates "phonies", "flits", "perverts" and aspires to become 'the catcher in the rye and all'. As one reviewer already mentioned, Caulfield maybe suffering from internalised homophobia (but, really, that's for you to decide). ENJOYABLE!!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Overrated
Review: You should only read this if you are seriously into character studies. I must admit that I only read the first half of the book and I had to force myself to get that far. The book is plotless. It is all about a few days in the life of a cynical, whiny and immature teenager with nothing to look forward to. A very depressing and hard read.
Rating:
Summary: The Catcher in the Rye... A real catch!
Review: This book deserves all the credit it can get! It rocks.... Although,yes, it is depressing at times, it is also hilarious and real. I'm 17 years old, only a year older than Holden,and, actually, I can kind of relate to his story-- All of the guys at his prep school, Pencey, seem very real.I'll admit, teenagers can be some of the phoniest people in the world. He does mention how much he hates phony things.... From teachers, to students, down to people he knows from other places, and how phony movies are. He is mature and seemingly wise beyond his sixteen years; and, yet, he acts like a twelve year old, too. He's the one of the most real teenage boy characters I've read about..... My favorite parts are when he talks about his little sister, Phoebe, and, his dead brother, Allie. They are believable characters, and, you can't help but like them, too. Holden's actions and responses to his experience is witty, but, it can also open your eyes and make you realize things from his point of view. It's too bad that this is on banned book lists, because, as a high school student, I think that if this book was offered in the ciricumlm, teens would read this, and enjoy it as much as I do!
Rating:
Summary: Annoying
Review: I despised this book. I found Holden to be arrogant, and one of the most annoying people on the planet. Tthe funny thing is, he's not a person, he's a character, and he truly made me mad. I had to force myself to finish the book because I would become so annoyed with Holden. It's a well written book, but I just could not stand him at all. If you are one to get annoyed very easily then do not read this book. Save yourself from the agony. As far as the story goes, it was okay. Things click with you from here and there... reasons for this, reasons for that. In all, I found nothing spectacular about this book and I wouldn't reccommend it to anyone.
Rating:
Summary: Impossible whining that'll make u CRINGE!!
Review: I read this years ago and all i remember was how self-indulgent the prose was and how it all amounted 2 a number of absurd clichés not even 6th graders would think of using. If it had been written by a 13 year old for 13 year old teens i would rethink upping it one star, but as it stands i can only send this out as a warning: if u want a fascin8ing account of adolescence please try "Less Than Zero". Whether u relate 2 it by metaphor or experience, it is a far better description of what teenage years can be like in their nihilism than this piece of literary formula.
Basically this is a consciously written "Bildungsroman Manqué" where the failure of Holden's growth 2wards "manhood" - he is 2 shy for sexual intercourse, the audience understands his pain @ not being a boy not yet a man, i puke, we all go home 2 watch porn online - is spread out like a twink's epidermic map of facial hair. Signs of an alien8ed adulthood looming...
Imagine Camus for pre-pubescent zit-faced intellectualoids w/ a martyr complex. Imagine a feminist oeuvre of victimhood for males.
Imagine a very annoying and dumb novel.
Rating:
Summary: Vexed By The Sex Question
Review: A classic of 20th century American literature, J. D. Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye (1951) is the timeless, hugely popular blueprint for all coming - of - age novels that followed. The book's 16 - year old protagonist and antihero, Holden Caulfield, is not a rebel as many believe, but a petulant, emotionally - injured, and insecure teenager who is fluent in outrage and at odds with almost every conceivable aspect of being alive. Unlike Fitzgerald's eager, amoral, and dashing Amory Blaine (This Side of Paradise, 1920), who delights in embracing and manipulating the shiny new worlds that open upon adulthood, Holden, who is grieving the recent death of a beloved younger brother, is a prematurely gray, lanky, and disgruntled loner belatedly stuck in the awkward years of adolescence. The privileged, somewhat spoiled son of a wealthy Manhattan family, the self - loathing Holden finds himself continuously surrounded by a web of other people who are obstructing embodiments of his own worst and most reviled qualities. Informatively, the Catcher In The Rye opens and closes with hazy manifestations of homosexuality. The first goes unrealized by Holden, but the second is conspicuously realized and causes a full - blown panic attack. In the first, Holden nudgingly provokes virile prep school roommate Stradlater into a symbolical rape, a rape that leaves the ostensibly defenseless Holden bloodied but unsatisfied. The charismatic, footloose Stradlater, who is nonchalantly used to getting his way with others, is, in Holden's eyes, "pretty handsome" and "very sexy," has "very broad shoulders," and is the type of young man Holden believes his own parents would find admirable; Holden comments repeatedly on the beauty of his roommate's golden hair. Unable to resist Stradlater's orbit, even while Stradlater is using the bathroom, Holden, a man obsessed, grabs his roommate in a headlock while he is shaving and bare - chested, and goes so far as to perform a spontaneous, effete mock tap dance for him. Crying out "It's the opening night of Ziegfeld Follies," Holden makes it clear that the role he is enacting in this courting ritual is one of a respectable citizen falling from grace by exhibiting his true, no - longer deniable inner nature. When the ignored Holden, who is a virgin, briefly backs away, Stradlater, "in just his damn shorts and all," gets "very damn playful" in return, and the two fall into a briefly blissful wrestling match on Holden's bed. Since during this episode Holden's irrepressible behavior -- and anger -- is ostensibly the result of Stradlater's "giving the time" to a young lady Holden covets, the narrative makes it clear that the atmosphere in their room is sexually - charged and haunted by displacement. A careful reading of this scene reveals that Holden, who reasonably lacks full self - awareness, is angry not because his roommate has had sexual intercourse with the young lady in question, but because Stradlater hasn't "given the time" to him. Afterward, Holden describes their violent fight -- which ends with Stradlater kneeling on Holden's chest, their drooling faces inches apart -- as a "tiff." Holden's combustible encounter with Stradlater is also partially a self - inflicted if failed initiation into manhood: "You never saw so much gore in your life. I had blood all over my mouth and chin and even on my pajamas and bathrobe. It partly scared me and partly fascinated me. All that blood and all sort of made me look tough." Is the bloodied Holden symbolically no longer a virgin? Does Stradlater's beating represent a provoked if less than fulfilling violation? Has Holden now become more of a man, or less of one? After the series of disastrous episodes that compose the balance of the story, some of which involve transvestites and "flits," as Holden calls homosexually - inclined men, the exhausted young man briefly finds false hope in the company of former teacher Mr. Antolini, one of the few adults for whom he has any respect. Comforted for the first time in the book by his teacher's wisdom and concern, Holden ("a very, very strange boy," Antolini calls him), "shaking like a madman," bolts from his mentor's apartment in well - realized homosexual panic when he awakens to find the married Mr. Antolini patting his head in the darkness. Is the wise, sympathetic Mr. Antolini molesting Holden or genuinely expressing anxious regard and tenderness? "I know more damn perverts, at school and all, than anybody you ever met, and they're always being perverty when I'm around," Holden now reveals. He has already conveyed that "Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are. I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away...sex is something I just don't understand. I swear to God I don't." What rules has Holden set for himself and then broken? Holden has been told that "half the married guys in the world were flits and didn't even know it," and is subsequently "waiting to turn into a flit or something." It may be that Holden, who despises "phonies" above all others, suffers profoundly from being an unconscious or semi - conscious phoney himself. Throughout the narrative, Holden's wishful associations with women prove to be more like sibling relationships than romantic or erotic attachments. Controversial in its day, The Catcher In The Rye shocked the American reading public with its coarse but realistic language and its sympathetic depiction of the morose, angry, often hilarious Holden, who was an explicit example of every "good" family's worse nightmare. Today's readers will relate to Holden as all honest readers did then and have since, since Holden is only a vulnerable, frightened, perceptive everyman searching for a single validating role in life, and one who is temporarily a little more lost in the world -- and within himself -- than most find desirable.
Rating: 
Summary: Very annoying but fairly entertaining
Review: This wasn't a great book or a horrible book just ok the character was very repetive and just very unlikeable always saying "this one is phony and that one is phony" just the most unlikeable character i've ever encountered in my life of reading. And everything depressed this guy did they not have anti-depressents in those days.There are a few good things about the book i enjoyed the frequent though misspelled usage of goddamn was a riot and the way the writer captured middle of the century new york accents was cool and the relationship between holden and his sister was also a nice bit but came way too late in the story to make up for the horribly written character.
Rating:
Summary: Honesty is beautiful
Review: I'm a 20 year old guy and was recommend this book by a friend, as I often like my friends to do. We all walk around with a slight bit of contempt for humanity, but reading books like The Catcher in the Rye makes us just accept things a bit more. That's why we like bands like Radiohead. We're all in this battle together. It really makes us better people, and less "phony," as Holden tries to put it. I felt closer to my friends, and even to my family after reading it--is that a bad thing? The Catcher in the Rye is a story about love ultimately, and it's quite touching. It's about reaching out, and being a good listener, and about clearing up the swirling mass of contradictions in our heads to ultimately lead to maturity. Sure, I like epic books about heros, and the ideal man too, but the Catcher in the Rye isn't one. If I had actually read this book in high school, it probably would have benefited me. It's funny though, because, not surprisingly, I rebelled against my English teacher and didn't want to read anything. I'm sure she'd be happy now that I read books on purpose. Anyway, I wrote this to let all people who might be in my situation (not an especially insightful or critical intellectual), that they might enjoy a book that hits close to home. And for those who aren't, it is nice to know that more people out there will indeed have a better understanding of people like me...
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