David L. Ulin is book critic of the Los Angeles Times. He is the editor of the award-winning anthology Writing Los Angeles and author of The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time.He named his six favorite books for The Week magazine.
One title on the list:
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. SalingerRead about the other entries on Ulin's list.
Not just for adolescents, Salinger’s landmark novel is, among other things, a portrait of a teenager losing his grip. “You don’t like anything that’s happening,” Holden Caulfield’s sister, Phoebe, tells him, and as the bookprogresses, Holden, adrift in Manhattan with no idea of how to navigate the world, experiences the fallout of that alienation, as his possibilities get stripped from him one by one.
The Catcher In The Rye appears on Nicholas Royle's list of the top ten writers on the telephone, TIME magazine's list of the top ten books you were forced to read in school, Tony Parsons' list of the top ten troubled males in fiction, Dan Rhodes' top ten list of short books, and Sarah Ebner's top 25 list of boarding school books; it is one of Sophie Thompson's six best books. Upon rereading, the novel disappointed Khaled Hosseini, Mary Gordon, and Laura Lippman.
--Marshal Zeringue
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