The Catcher in the Rye vs. The Bell Jar

think of catcher in the rye any time i get maudlin about the innocence of youth, or wh3en i see a duck pond
think of bell jar anytime i am supremely depressed and want to be dead, or when i think about work at fashion magazines, or tuberculosis, or putting grape jelly in an avocado

bell jar ALSO anytime i drink vodka straight!! or see a roll of carpet

yessss so many little observational details are just so well rendered you can't forget them

it's just a brilliant book. i have only read some of plath's poetry but i think i am going to read ariel this summer

I can't vote here, I love both of these too much

CITR is a different, and maybe better, book when you reread it as an adult, or at least it was for me. ppl always remember holden's bluster, but when i come back to the book it's his sheer fragility and lostness that stands out. feels like a much sadder book to me than the bell jar (which i also luv).

interesting. holden obviously doesn't encounter the outer reaches of misery -- where it becomes a mortal illness -- the way esther does, but he doesn't have the same capacity to understand and (perhaps) get through his situation that esther does, so i could see how the book could seem even bleaker. for me, the bell jar was a much more upsetting reading experience.

catcher also much funnier when read as an adult. last i read it (~15yrs ago) i also remember more distance, more irony, less sense of identification between author and protagonist than how it's generally considered, i think.

Catcher hit me hard as a teenager. The Bell Jar I read later, in my mid-20s, and I loved it. In my 40s, I re-read Catcher with trepidation, expecting to hate it. But I thought it held up extremely well, despite a certain sentimentalism I hadn't particularly noticed as a teenager. I've yet to re-read The Bell Jar, so I can't say.

On another note, it's over six years since Salinger died, and not a peep about the six or seven novels he supposedly had locked up in his vault in his Cornish hideaway, I wonder what the story is there. Surely his executors have had a look by now. Strange nothing has leaked out.

http://www.blogto.com/listings/cafes/upload/2010/04/2010417-belljar-menu.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Wxvz8O9.jpg

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