Monday, November 5, 2012

A Post-Catcher World

Emily Temple at Flavorwire proposes these 10 Novels to Replace Catcher in the Rye as the Perfect Teen Book. Looking to pick up something relevant, readable, and new myself, I'm interested. I would also like to add Skippy Dies, Paul Murray's painful paean to teenage angst -- the real kind. It's about ... it's about how "like, people are always going somewhere? Like everybody's always trying to be not where they are?..."

"It's like, you know, inside every stove there's a fire. Well, inside every grass blade there's a grass blade, that's just like burning up with being a grass blade. And inside every tree, there's a tree, and inside every person there's a person, and inside this world that seems so boring and ordinary, if you look hard enough, there's a totally amazing magical beautiful world."

That's what Skippy Dies is about.

Definitely worth it.

Incidentally, I'm about to teach Catcher in a few weeks to ninth graders. Are we, as Emily Temple and Jessica Roake at Slate suggest, living in a post-Catcher world?



1 comment:

  1. When we live in a world where each of us knows what it is we're supposed to be doing and how we're supposed to act in order to connect with, well, anyone at all--and none of that feels like it is killing our very soul--then perhaps we'll be living in a post-Catcher world. I look forward to getting to that point and telling my children tales of bad old days.

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