Your Choice to Read it or Not -Cathcher in the Rye

Your Choice to Read it or Not

The book ‘Catcher in the Rye’ written by J.D. Salinger is an issue started from the time 1960s until now a days. The reason why so many people are keep talking about this book is because this book is about a teenager’s life but in a different type from the other coming of age books. A teenage boy drinking alcohol, girls, sex and withdrawal from the school. It doesn’t sound good just reading the theme but this is the magnetism of this book. No one had tried to write a coming age story with a main character being different, to say it in a disrespect way, being mad. Still, I would suggest the peoples to read this book and I will try to change their mind which is full of prejudice.

             The first major reason I would suggest to read this book is because, while you are reading this book, you will have an indirect experience of all the happenings that the main character is suffering. In my opinion it was very weird to read a madman’s thoughts and actions. And I realized that human can have a big difference from what they say or look in the outside and the inside. To add on in Holden’s (main character) life, there are various kinds of happenings and it is very rare to experience what Holden went through. Such as getting kicked out of school, lost one brother from leukemia, and having a mental problem.

Second reason why I would like to offer this book to the others is because you have to think about why Holden said this. For an example once he said that he will hide his children and never let them go to school. I couldn’t think of the reason why. But I realized that the chapter before was a story of Holden trying to meet his sister in her school (she goes to an elementary school) and he saw a scribble on the wall written, “Fuck you”. So he wanted to protect his children from a mature or dangerous world from hiding them and not letting them go to school. This is why I liked this book. You really have to think the reason. And the more you think about the book, the more you get in to the book.

On the other hand, most of the people had many dissatisfaction of this book. Like, the American Library Association (ALA) says on its website that “In 1960, a teacher in Tulsa, Okla.was fired for assigning the book to an eleventh grade English class. The teacher appealed and was reinstated by the school board, but the book was removed from use in the school. In 1963, a delegation of parents of high school students in Columbus, Ohio, asked the school board to ban the novel for being ‘anti-white’ and ‘obscene’. And also Adam Gopnik writes about a man in his 40s who loved the book Catcher in the Rye but feared that his own son would find the environment too distant to connect.

Although Catcher in the Rye has many issues I think that people should allow this book to the students. Because it is a life of someone and someone around the world could have a similar situation or a milieu with Holden. And to them, it might mean that  their life is so bad that the student may not know about their life. And I don’t think that there’s such a big problem about this book that the schools rebuffed this book. So I would like to recommend this book to the people to read it. I hope my two reasons to read the ‘Catcher in the Rye’ had convinced the people who had a strong prejudice.