1. The Catcher and the Rye

When you set out to read all the books of classic literature, and you haven’t been much of a reader previously; it’s very difficult to start.  When I initially went to the library, I forgot to take a list with me, so I was stuck looking for the few books that I could remember were considered classics.  Therefore my choice to read this book first was not all my own.  It wasn’t a bad choice though.  I’ll admit that it was very hard to sit and read without having the tendency to fall asleep.  At first, I could only put in an hour or two at a time before finding myself asleep with the book in my lap.  Anything worth doing is probably going to be hard though, or at least that’s what I believe, so I kept on trying.  The following are my thoughts on the first book of what will be many.  The Catcher in the Rye.

I don’t know what my expectations were when I started reading this book, but they certainly were off completely.  Maybe I’ve been watching too many action-packed movies or something, because I thought that there was going to be some sort of adventurous element to this novel.  I was wrong.  In reality, the book is about real life.  It follows a young man’s life over a few days, as he struggles with the problems of the world, and the problems within himself.  The story takes place in the 1940′s in the Northeast, most of which is set in New York City.

What I found most intriguing about the book is the main character, Holden.  At first, I found his profanities rather irritating – as I am not much of a swearer myself – but as I read on I learned to ignore them and focus on what he was really saying.  Because the book is written in the 1st person, everything is told from his perspective, allowing him to comment on every situation he is confronted with.  He also seems to be telling it in past tense, almost as if he is reliving his memories for the readers benefit.  Beyond his profanities, and his obvious immaturities, is a profound disgust with the world around him; more specifically, human behavior.  He points out the obvious short-comings of everyone he crosses paths with, critisizing them at every available moment.  The most interesting part of this, is that we all do it to some extent, and whether we keep it to ourselves is besides the point.

I myself am disgusted with human behavior on a daily basis.  I am disgusted when I’m driving.  I am disgusted when I’m at home.  During the complete cycle of a day, I am confronted with a million situations where I am ashamed of the behavior that I see around me; convinced that I have nothing in common with the rest of the apes.  Holden, is exactly the same as me, only fictional.  He shares some very valid thoughts about the way people behave, and one of my favorite words used by him is the world “phony.”

I’ll admit that the language used in the 40′s is much different then the way we talk now.  They obviously had their own slang, with adjectives that nobody really says anymore.  It was almost like I had an insight into a world that I will never live in, and I absolutely loved it.  I remember one of my teachers talking about voice recordings from the early 1900′s and how they can’t tell us how people really talked back then, because they would always put on a phony radio voice whenever they were being recorded.  For me, reading this book was like being able to hear a voice from the past.  Historically, I’m sure that Holden’s views and opinions of society cannot be considered as the norm, yet, they are surprising telling of how people really behave.

Holden has no idea what he should do with his life, although, he is sure that he doesn’t want to be like many of his associates.  The people who are around him are the classic stereotypes of people who we all associate with in our own lives.  There is the irritating boy living next to him in the dorms, who lacks a large degree of personal hygeine, but is always eager for conversation.  There is his roommate, who is a classic example of an arrogant young man who is so obviously in love with himself.  There’s an older couples who’s house smells.  That is a classic stereotype, that is very often true.  Beyond that are his stereotypes of a few women he comes in contact with, as well as his cute little sister.  We all know people who fit these profiles and that is why they work.  This reason the characters appealed to me so deeply was because of how readily I could associate the people I knew with them.  It’s the same reason why I buy into Holden’s many criticisms of their behavior.

The thing that I like best in the book is how Holdens language changes when he’s talking about certain people.  For instance, Jane, who he spent a summer with.  When he started speaking about her for the first time, all of his swearing and criticisms ended, and for a moment I felt as though he really cared about her.  The same was true for his little sister.  When he would speak to her or about her, there was nothing but reverence in his language.  This makes the language of the novel very authentic.  People tend to censor themselves depending on what they are talking about or who they are talking to.  Often, I think we don’t want to associate anything vulgar, or low with people that we really respect, and so we leave those things out of the conversation when we’re talking about them – sometimes unconsciously.  I really enjoyed the few moments in which Holden displayed this.

I also really related to Holden’s desire, towards the end of the book, to run away from home.  He even asks a girl to join him in beginning a new life somewhere far away, even though he really doesn’t like her that much.  When she refuses, he decides that he will follow through with his plan himself, and if not for the protests of his little sister, he may have gone though with it.  The thought process that led up to this decision really make his character seem genuine.  The natural human thought of the majority of the population when confronted with changes in their life that they don’t think they can handle, is to run away.  I thought it fit, and I also thought that it was a good way to finish the story.

All in all, I can’t really think of how to express my feelings of this book.  It wasn’t at all what I expected, and so it threw me off a bit at first.  Once I got into it, I really enjoyed the story.  It was descriptive at length about every situation, and yet, not overly descriptive.  It explained the characters well, especially Holden, and they all played their part well in contributing to the main characters perspectives.  The story, although about regular life, was not boring in the least, and if not for my recent lack of sleep, I probably could have read it competely in one go.  Although it was written over 50 years ago, the story is still relevant to our lives today, and I would recommend it to young adults.

And so it begins…

It seems to me that everyone gets to a point in their life when they start to wonder what it is they should do with the rest of it.  Recently, I have begun to feel the very same way, and it has led me to a few realizations about my life.  These realizations came when I started up classes again at Utah Valley University.  I had taken the summer off, considering it a well-deserved break from 5 straight semesters of school-not that those 5 semesters were very stressful or difficult.  The interesting thing about taking the summer off is that I had things that I wanted to accomplish during the summer, like starting a website for instance, and writing a novel.  As it turns out I failed miserably and spent most of my summer doing little more than working full-time and wasting the remainder of the days playing computer games.  Now as I look back, it does seem like a bit of a waste.

So I admitted that to myself, promising that I would get back into school with an added measure of zeal, making the most of my college experience.  The one other thing I was supposed to do over the summer was to decide what my emphasis would be, within the Digital Media major.  I failed to do that as well, and upon returning to school I was again at a loss for what kind of career I would like to pursue.  At first, I figured that I would just go through this semester, and then at the end; decide.  There are still plenty of classes I can take that would apply to any emphasis, so I thought it wouldn’t be a terrible thing to wait another semester.  Besides, nothing had really caught my attention yet.

This was exactly what I had decided right before I got an email for the financial aid office saying that I wasn’t eligible for financial aid because I hadn’t made “satisfactory academic progress.”  It wasn’t really a big deal.  I hadn’t declared my major, so naturally I needed to do so if I wanted to receive any kind of federal financial aid.  I’d already received a scholarship to cover me for the next year, so it didn’t really matter, but for some reason it mattered to me.  It was almost as if somebody had come right out and told me that I had been a bum, and that it was about time to make a decision.  I mean, it really got to me.  Over the next few weeks I was constantly weighing my options and think and praying about what I should do.  I’m sure a lot people go through something like this, and I’m sure nobody wants to make the wrong decision, even if there may not really be a “wrong decision.”  For me, I just didn’t want to be stuck doing something for the rest of my life that I didn’t enjoy doing.  More than that, I didn’t want to end up going back to school again like a lot of older people do nowadays.  One major, and that’s all for me, thank you very much.  I’m not gonna be one of those eternal students that just doesn’t know how to move on.

So under these conditions classes began, and I found myself once again immersed in the world of Digital Media.  I was taking a Marketing class, a Interaction Design class, a Project Management class, in addition to a Digital Audio Restoration class.  I had registered later than I should have unfortunately, so I had been forced to pick some of these classes based on schedule rather than a desire to take them, so none of them were web design based, which I was pretty sure would be my emphasis.  Over my first few weeks of school, while I was still in the mindset of needing to pick an emphasis once and for all, I became rather disinterested in the major all together.  I started looking around at my peers, and listening to what they had to say and thinking that I just didn’t belong here.  What was so strange about it, was that I had never felt that way before.  When I first started college I thought that maybe I would like to be a teacher instead, but since that time, I had been wholly engaged in the realm of Digital Media.  Regardless of the indecision that I felt in picking an emphasis, I had resolved that I would one day do so, and finish my degree in Digital Media.  It was so weird to suddenly have a complete change of heart and wonder whether I should even be there at all.  This was the 1st of my realizations.

Somehow during this time, I started thinking again about my desire to be a writer.  I had always enjoyed writing, in fact, I had been writing creatively since I was youth.  I had always been very creative, and had quite the imagination.  In my teenage years I had turned my writing skills from stories, to writing songs instead, and continued that until the present day.  Thinking about it now, I’m surprised that I never considered becoming a writer at all.  Aren’t people supposed to pick something that they love to do as their profession.  Yes, but do we?  No.  Most people pick a job that will make good money, and they end up loving it because they love having lots of money.  Not for me.  I want to work normal work hours so I can be with my family, and I don’t really care about what kind of salary I have so long as it is enough to provide for family.  The only trouble with this approach is that you have to know what you love to do.  You can’t just decide to be a doctor or a lawyer because the money is good.  So if I love to write, why shouldn’t I do that for a living?  I always wanted to do some sort of writing on the side anyway, but without some instruction it always feels so laborious.  If I needed to take some creative writing classes anyway, why not just major in it; a second realization.

This was the decision that led me to one conclusion.  After this semester I was either going to be a writer, or a web designer, and if I was going to be a writer, then I need to read more books.  If you want to be a good writer, then you have to be an avid reader.  I read that somewhere, and when I did it was like a brick hitting me in the head after it had dropped from building.  It’s one of those things that makes you feel like an idiot because you should have known it all along, only you were too stupid to figure it out, so you had to read it somewhere.  It was these realizations that made me think about literature in a way that I had never thought about it before.  In school I had always avoided reading literature, and found summaries on the internet to read instead, so I would have enough information to take a quiz or write a paper.  It is a dishonest thing to do, but almost every kid does it nowadays.  Now that I think about it, it’s one of the saddest facts that I know, right up there with the amount of starving children in the world.  Literature used to be a huge deal, but now it’s been replaced by movies, video games, and a whole lot of nothing worth watching on television.  To those who still love literature, books continue to be written and added to the list of must-reads, but to those who have their minds elsewhere, literature might as well not exist, and the classics of literature that have been praised for so many years are all but forgotten by the rising generation.  Sure children may read Harry Potter, but only the rare child will read Sense and Sensibility, or The Great Gatsby from cover to cover, even when they get to college.  As I consider all the books that exist in the world, and the fact that I have never read any of them, it hurts me, especially when I consider how many lame movies, and dull TV shows I have sat through.

So at this time in my life I have decided that I am going to be a writer.  I am going to meet with an advisor in the English department of Utah Valley University to make it official, and I am going to stick to it like gum on the bottom of a rubber soled shoe.  In addition to that decision, I am going to read all the classics of literature that I have been missing out on all these years, because of the world, and it’s unnecessary distractions.  I am going to be a well read individual and though I may not be able to quote every book that I read, I will at least know the storyline, the main characters, and what it was all about.  And if I don’ know what the author was intending to say to me, I will at least know what I got out of it.  And if I am going to read a book at all, then I might as well get something out of it, otherwise, what’s the point of putting in the time at all.  From here on, I will populate this webpage with my thoughts on the books that I have read, and who knows, maybe one day I will read them and remember that it was time well spent.  I will remember that I shutdown the computer, that I turned off the television, and that I kept the netflix movie for a few more days, just so I could open up a book and let my imagination take a ride every now and then.

I know that in this decision I am all but alone in regards to my peers.  Only a handful of them will ever read the list of books that I am intending to read.  But that’s ok.  Only a handful of people in the world really have unique experiences.  Most people just follow in the footsteps of those who went before them, without really doing anything new, and for many, it turns out to be a tragic cycle.  I refuse to allow this to happen to me.  I am going to do something different.  While the majority of my peers go through the motions of college life, writing papers when they must, and reading books when required, I am going to do something academic by choice.  While the majority of my peers spend most of their spare time engaged in activities that produce only temporary joy or pleasure at the expense of brain cells, I will increase my brain capacity by choice.  And while the majority of my peers will never read what I write, or know even the most miniscule amount about the books I will read, I will do it by choice, and it will be a great experience that will start me a path that can only lead to more good and worthwhile ventures.  I only hope that somewhere, at sometime, someone will derive something useful from what will be my journey through literature