19. Nine Stories by JD Salinger

Maybe after my last post, you expected me to read The Great Gatsby. Nope. Instead I read this short story collection that I've been dying to get my hands on.

When I read The Catcher in the Rye, I honestly hated it. I remember going to school the next day and complaining to my English teacher that I didn't get the point. He asked if everything had to have a point, and I said no, but I expected that a book that everyone else liked so much would have a point.

Then, one of my friends told me to read Franny and Zooey, which is actually two shorts stories, "Franny" and Zooey." I bought the book, but then I think it languished on my shelf for a good two years. Then one day I picked it up and loved it. Franny and Zooey are members of the Glass family -- a cast of characters that appear throughout Salinger's works. I eventually read Raise High the Roofbeams Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction last summer, two more stories about the Glass family. This book was the missing piece.

Only two stories are about Glass family members, but in "Seymour: a Introduction" another Glass -- Buddy -- takes credit for two more of the stories.

Salinger's stories are usually about rich, young people from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and I love them all so much. They're all ambiguous, unhappy and unresolved (I just realized that the antecedent of that pronoun is unclear, but the sentence works with both the stories and the characters being represented by "they," so I'm leaving it).

They're all random and frivolous -- stories of unhappy girls who drown their sorrows in booze, men who were messed up by "the war" -- be it WWII or Korea and children much smarter and sadder than they should be. It's real life. It's awesome.

If I ever wrote a book I'd want to be like Salinger and write messy characters who make bad, irrational decisions. I'd write stories whose endings were unclear, where ramblings were not only allowed but encouraged and women are just as useful as men (Salinger likes female characters, which makes me happy).

"The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid."