J.D. Salinger Dies at 91

There are only five books that I have read more than once. Four of them were written by J. D. Salinger. He is my very favorite fiction writer which makes me one among millions.

The first time I read his masterpiece Catcher in the Rye, I was in 8th grade, just a bit younger than Holden himself. I remember that The Hobbit was all the rage and my friends and I were passing it around like a family-size bag of Jay's.* I hated it. I hated the little the gnomes. I didn't care about the stupid ring.

Then I caught wind of Catcher. The word on the street (which meant my mother talking on the phone to her best friend Charlotte) was that the book was dirty. This is all the information that I and my friends needed to obtain a copy of it. When you're just shy of 14 years old, there could be no other label more likely to cause a stampede to the library. Dirty books have contributed more to teenage literacy than many English classes.

In any event, I read the dirty book. It was disappointing in only one respect: it wasn't dirty. ("So he goes to a prostitute," my friends and I discussed, "but they don't do anything!")

But Holden Caulfield I loved. He was so real to me. I knew just what he meant when he realized that the world was full of phonies. I knew he wanted to do well. Why didn't the people he disappointed know that? And where were his parents? Didn't they know their kid was walking around dangerous New York City in the cold? Holden wanted to save children from falling off the cliff. He'd catch them. Why weren't any adults catching him?

In short, something happened to me when I read that book, something that had never happened before. For the first time, I started to empathize with a character in a book. Holden Caulfield knocked on my door, grabbed my hand and took me on his journey. And it wasn't any stupid, phony journey about a bunch of non-human, toad people questing for a piece of jewelry that was supposed to change the world. Holden was real, and I was there to witness it. Catcher in the Rye wasn't a book - it was a diary. For the first time in my life, a book picked me up and dropped me in someone else's life. No wonder my mother and Charlotte were talking about it.

When I was in my twenties, I read Franny and Zooey, two short stories published together which read like a single book. If you haven't read it, here's the action of the plot: Franny Glass breaks off her engagement to a rich guy and goes home to New York City to have a nervous breakdown on the living room couch of her parent's New York apartment. Her brother Zooey, an aspiring actor, tells her a lot of stories about their older genius brothers, and ultimately saves her by pretending he is one of the genius brothers on the phone, but he's really calling her from an extension phone in the apartment.* Yeah, I know. Doesn't sound like much.

Franny and Zooey is my favorite book in the world. It's about the universal feeling that what you want to do with your life is different than what the world says you're supposed to do. It's about the universal feeling that your family is ugh and that everyone else's family is "normal" and cool. It's about how you use your family history to pull you up but reject the living members of the family. It's about how your very uncool family saves you. It's about how helping a member of your family can take you from being a schlep into something indiscernibily close to being a loving, multi-dimensional human being. And it's about God. Franny and Zooey is all that in 201 pages with two characters, a couch, a bathroom and an extension phone. Maybe this Salinger guy knew how to write, huh?

Of course I read the more prominent biographies of Salinger. The first was written by Joyce Maynard, At Home in the World: a Memoir. Maynard was her own sort of wunderkind who started a letter-writing relationship with Salinger. By this time, he was fifty-ish, a divorced father of two and hermetically ensconced in a farmhouse in Cornish, New Hampshire. Maynard fascinated him and he invited her to his home - a singular event. They became lovers and notwithstanding their 30 year+ age difference, Maynard moved in. Then it all went bad. Apparently, J.D. is nuts. Worse, he's a control freak. When he started to tell young Joyce how to quilt, she bolted.

A few years later, Salinger's daughter Margaret published Dream Catcher: a Memoir. If you didn't hear it the first time, hear it now. He's nuts. He drinks his own urine for health reasons. On the good side, he's never stopped writing. There are 50 years of unpublished Salinger that we may read some day.

But do we want to? Holden may still be working his problems out in perpetuity, but do we still want to listen? Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951 and sometime in the 1960s, Salinger went into seclusion. That's right. No Oprah. No People Magazine. The guy shut himself off from the world. He wanted his privacy*. So very un-21st century.

This is another reason we should love him, of course. It' s all making me sad and I haven't even mentioned Nine Stories or Raise High the Roofbeams and Seymour: a love story. The Glass family - don't get me started.

So, great writer, goofy human being. I'm not sure why I connected to his stories but I did and his death saddens me. I feel that we lost something. Perhaps I should take Holden's advice at the end of Catcher, and just let it go. "Don't tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

* For those of you unlucky few who weren't raised in Chicago, Jay's refers to Jay's Potato Chips - the best and greasiest chips on the planet and the favorite of acne-scarred teens for decades.

* An extension phone was another phone in the house on the same line. This is when phones had cords, an "immobile" phone if you will.

* Before Facebook, and camera phones and YouTube and blogs and Oprah and People Magazine, people used to keep their personal lives sort of secret. Honestly.

Magical Realism

An old friend enthusiastically recommended a new novel to me. Then I saw a review describing the book as "Harry Potter for grownups." I was mildly offended - didn't about 8 million grownups read and enjoy all 100,000 words? (I'm a librarian. I could have looked those numbers up, but I chose to invent them instead. Sorry.)

But I think I missed the point. The reviewer said "Harry Potter grows up." Or in this case, Quentin, from The Magicians by Lev Grossman, goes from being a genius high school senior in Brooklyn to being a first year student at Brakebills, a five year magician's college in upstate New York. Sign me up!


I've always loved books about ordinary kids and magic, starting with Half-Magic by Edward Eager, moving on to Steel Magic and Dragon Magic by Andre Norton (no one does this better than Ms. Norton), and of course, the magical world of C. S. Lewis' Narnia, to which Mr. Grossman pays sly homage in his new novel. The writers I mention understood that "real" magic wasn't always fun or cute, but could be sad and scary - just like "real" life.

J. K. Rowling understands that, and Lev Grossman gets it too. His older students may transform themselves into geese and fly to Antarctica (shades of The Once and Future King!), but they also sometimes drink too much and sleep with the wrong people. If you ever wondered what a Hogwarts grad might do for a living if they didn't become an Auror, or play professional Quidditch, The Magicians suggests some possibilities.

Maybe it's the juxtaposition of mundane and magical that we like so much. Harry Dresden still has to get around Chicago in a cranky Volkswagen Beetle despite the presence of demons and pixies in his everyday life. Magic doesn't solve everything, and in fact, often makes life harder. In The Magicians, Quentin discovers that having magical powers is no more a guarantee of success than a degree from Harvard or Yale. As a reader, I guess I just like magic for its own sake, because it makes "real" life a little bigger, a little different, and a lot more interesting.

I'll leave you with one more nugget for thought: are there any Jewish kids at Hogwarts?

How do you like your reads?

Online or in a staff meeting, or just across the cubicle divide, where ever and whenever my colleagues and I get together, the favorite topic of conversation is "What are you reading right now?" I know, I know, I work in a library, so that's a natural question and a topic that never seems to get old with us bibliophiles. What we choose to read provides insight into who we are, how we think, what we fear, love, and dream.

But the question I'm pondering today is this: how do you like to read?

Take a moment, if you will, to think about a few of these questions, and please feel free to post your answers.

• Do you curl up in your favorite chair or under a tree? Where is your ideal reading spot?

• Are your books' pages pristine and their spines lined up in alphabetical order, or do you stack them on any available surface and mark favorite passages?

• When is the best time of day to read: morning, afternoon, or nighttime?

• What's your preference: hardcover books, trade paperbacks, or mass market paperbacks? How about audio books or e-books?

• Do you use a bookmark or do you dog-ear?

• When you're ready to take a break, do you stop where you're at, or push on through to the chapter break?

• Do you ever sneak a peek at the ending or is that taboo?

Like candles and bath salts can enhance the experience of a bath -- or buffalo wings and a 50" plasma TV can rev up a ball game, if you prefer a sports reference -- so too can the right setting transform a simple read into one of life's greatest pleasures. (In my opinion, a candlelit bath is a darn good setting for a quiet read!) What comforting little habits create a really good read for you? And what does the way we read tell us about ourselves and each other?