Saturday, October 23, 2004
Still no redesign
No, I still haven't redesigned the site. Still no comments, and the permalinks are completely unstyled. Compatibility with older templates does not seem to be a Blogger feature, but I still like the improvements they've made.
No, I still haven't redesigned the site. Still no comments, and the permalinks are completely unstyled. Compatibility with older templates does not seem to be a Blogger feature, but I still like the improvements they've made.
Dead or alive
J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, Aging Gracelessly (washingtonpost.com)
Okay, first of all: J.D. Salinger is still alive? How could I have missed that? I heard or read at least two interviews with his daughter a few years ago when she published a book about him, but I don't remember any of them mentioning the fact that he was actually still alive at the time.
But second, I'm quite relieved to find out that I am not alone in not really liking Catcher in the Rye or The Old Man and the Sea. Granted, I was in my 20s by the time I read Catcher in the Rye, so maybe I was just too old for the angst to appeal to me--although I've never outgrown young adult literature, so I don't think that's the case. I do remember, as Yardley mentions in this article, that the voice seemed forced, especially compared to the narrators of some of the excellent young adult novels I grew up with. For example, The Outsiders has its faults (one of them being the too-obvious influence of both Rebel Without a Cause and Catcher in the Rye) but you can't deny the authenticity of the voice--natural enough for a first-person young adult novel written by a 15-year-old.
Yardley suggests that Catcher in the Rye created the image of teen angst that persists today. Even though it was published as an adult novel, I do think it paved the way for the young adult genre to move away from strictly romance (in the 30s and 40s) and the occasional boys' adventure novel to the more realistic "problem novels" that dominated YA in the late 60s and 70s, and are only now starting to be overtaken by teen chick lit and YA fantasy. It proved that adults would buy a book with a teenage protagonist, which probably made publishers more likely to look at books like The Outsiders and A Separate Peace. So even though I didn't care much for the book itself, and I don't think it necessarily still needs to be required reading in high school, it might have had a profound effect on adolescent readers merely by making it possible for good books that might not have otherwise been published to exist. So I'm moving it from my list of Books Everyone Says You Should Have Read to my list of Not-Great Books You Should Read Because of Their Cultural Impact. It will bump Peyton Place down a notch.
J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, Aging Gracelessly (washingtonpost.com)
Okay, first of all: J.D. Salinger is still alive? How could I have missed that? I heard or read at least two interviews with his daughter a few years ago when she published a book about him, but I don't remember any of them mentioning the fact that he was actually still alive at the time.
But second, I'm quite relieved to find out that I am not alone in not really liking Catcher in the Rye or The Old Man and the Sea. Granted, I was in my 20s by the time I read Catcher in the Rye, so maybe I was just too old for the angst to appeal to me--although I've never outgrown young adult literature, so I don't think that's the case. I do remember, as Yardley mentions in this article, that the voice seemed forced, especially compared to the narrators of some of the excellent young adult novels I grew up with. For example, The Outsiders has its faults (one of them being the too-obvious influence of both Rebel Without a Cause and Catcher in the Rye) but you can't deny the authenticity of the voice--natural enough for a first-person young adult novel written by a 15-year-old.
Yardley suggests that Catcher in the Rye created the image of teen angst that persists today. Even though it was published as an adult novel, I do think it paved the way for the young adult genre to move away from strictly romance (in the 30s and 40s) and the occasional boys' adventure novel to the more realistic "problem novels" that dominated YA in the late 60s and 70s, and are only now starting to be overtaken by teen chick lit and YA fantasy. It proved that adults would buy a book with a teenage protagonist, which probably made publishers more likely to look at books like The Outsiders and A Separate Peace. So even though I didn't care much for the book itself, and I don't think it necessarily still needs to be required reading in high school, it might have had a profound effect on adolescent readers merely by making it possible for good books that might not have otherwise been published to exist. So I'm moving it from my list of Books Everyone Says You Should Have Read to my list of Not-Great Books You Should Read Because of Their Cultural Impact. It will bump Peyton Place down a notch.