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A Few Literary Thoughts Before Bed
Indulging in the Classics as a hedge against the monotony of modern pop culture.
Where to go from here…?
Thanks to a prior laudatory comment some time ago by Carlyn Beccia on my particular literary style, I was inspired to finally tackle the entirety of Catcher in the Rye. I’ve been trying to tackle more of the classics in the last several years, but I’ve only managed to scratch a couple of notable titles off of my literary bucket list; others being ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse Five’, Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’, Zamyatan’s ‘We’, Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ Trilogy and Heinlein’s ‘Starship Troopers’ and ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’.
I’m still processing Catcher in the Rye, given that I only finished it today. I hope to see what impact it leaves on me, because on first blush it seems a rather unremarkable, meandering story of a few days in the life of a mixed-up kid. I do have an impression that it was a bit of a controversy when it was first released, based on what I’ve read about the book before, so I will have to do some more research and compare it to other titles of the era to fully understand why this was the case, but I expect the majority of the controversy had to do with the depiction of a teenager drinking, smoking and…