I am always late in putting up stuff, this one is supposed to be out weeks back.

 Salinger and his master piece were in the news after a long time and it made me thinking, again, of the kind of influence his book had on people and all that. I think there was this phase of my life, where I used to read anything that came under ‘The best novels of all time’ kinda section thinking it would be a cool show off in literature related conversations or something like that, I don’t exactly remember, I have a bad memory you know. So in this frantic effort to read these “cult books” I stumbled upon Catcher in the Rye. After reading the first page, for a moment I was shocked, can somebody write like that? Is this allowed? Do they accept such style as books?

    I always used to think there is this secret community of old people wearing weird clothes deciding on which books to be put up on classics section and I just couldn’t fit the catcher in rye with the kind of image I had for this community. And if you ever happen to meet one of them, I imagined, they would go on about how a classic should be, stroking their long white beards, "oh the style, the punctuation, the long complicated sentences with deep meaning that would make you read them twice to really understand and think like a hundred times to get the intended meaning behind it.", and then, since it is a secret community and you just met one of them, they have to kill you, anyhow . . 

I am not criticizing the classics or anything, oh I never would. But, Catcher in the Rye has changed my style of thinking, from ‘he is one of the finest authors . . .’    to      ‘boy, does he write well’.

And when I read this book it kept reminding me of some one I knew, all the time. Till one day, boom, it struck me Holden Caulfield is a lot like calvin of calvin & hobbes. If Calvin ever had to grow up, which honestly I hope he wouldn’t, this would be exactly his autobiography, word to word I say. It made me thinking, Bill Watterson and J.D Salinger, both this reclusive types that were so particular about their creation that they protected the copyrights with great care, are similar in so many ways. A classic case of great minds think alike . . .