Nine Stories

Nine Stories Franny and Zooey

Older Stuff: The Bible/Quran, The Republic (Plato), The Social Contract (Rousseau), Tao Te Ching (Laozi), Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides) Newer Stuff: Nine Stories (Salinger), The Razor's Edge (Maugham), Nausea (Sartre), Siddartha (Hesse), Road to Serfdom (Hayek), The Book (Watts), Design of Everyday Things (Norman), Atlas Shrugged (Rand), Invisible Man (Ellison), Debunking Economics (Keen), Blood Meridian (McCarthy), The Center Cannot Hold (Saks), This Time Is Different (Reinhart/Rogoff), Infinite Jest (Wallace), Calvin and Hobbes (Watterson) All of these books are well written and have given me some perspective on interesting people/situations/ways of thinking.

I haven't seen it! I haven't seen anything. I finished F&Z last night. The thing is a train wreck. Now I'm curious to read the rest of what Salinger published (pretty easy to do) because Catcher and Nine Stories are so good and F&Z borderline intolerable. Perhaps it was his Metal Machine Music. Does Tenenbaums principally consist of turgid dialogue about mysticism?

I guess it's a failed experiment the way Catcher in the Rye was a successful experiment. But it's kind of interesting despite that. I like how daringly he injects esoteric religious material into conventional 1950s settings. But it was too hard to pull off. None of the characters is captivating and most of them, especially Zooey, are asses in a way that doesn't feel entirely intentional. I'm on a Salinger kick, having run across his books for a couple bucks in a used bookstore and never having read him before. He is a singular writer. Catcher was a freak success. Like Kurt Cobain, Salinger would clearly have been happier as an obscure cult artist. But Catcher was the opening bell of the 60s counterculture just as the 50s were getting started. Once it picked up a wave it became a tsunami.…