Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

I recently set for myself a lofty goal of reading every book in a list I found online of 50 Banned Books. After struggling through this one, I put off the goal for a while.

One of the acknowledged "classics" of American literature, I found this stream-of-conciousness styled story very hard to continue. I admit at the outset that I had never encountered this style of writing before, and that may shade my opinion of it somewhat. But I found it extremely tedious, and the main character Holden Caufield to be the most boring fictional character I have ever read.

The basic premise, for those of you who may never have read it either before now, is a weekend in the life of a young teen who has recently been expelled from a prep school. His adventures in New York City, while living extravagantly (in my opinion) on money he has acquired prior to his expulsion.

Most of the time, he is either drinking himself silly or ranting about the jerks he has met. Apparently he doesn't like anybody he ever met, except for his younger sister. While in NYC, he has a couple of encounters with the seedier side of big city life, including an experience with a prostitute. In every encounter, he goes on about what jerks the people are whom he meets.

While I am the most vocal of advocates against censorship, and despite my opinion of the piece, I still think it shouldn't be banned. I just don't have a very high opinion of the book.

Rate it 3 stars. And that's being generous.

The Stand by Stephen King

In 1978, Stephen King first published The Stand, clocking in at some 800 pages. Some 13 years later, he re-released the book, "complete and uncut", with what was said to be material left on the editing room floor to comply with his editor's suggestion that a novelist who only had a couple of novels under his belt (at that time) would be ill-advised to have an 1100 page novel released.

I read the original published version of The Stand in 1984, while working as a security guard, with a lot of time on my hands between my rounds. I was impressed with it then, but not being the big Stephen King fan that make up the majority of his following, I saw no need to rehash the story again when the unabridged version came out in 1991.

However, while discussing the filmed version one day last week, I was informed of several things that intrigued me by a friend who was working from a reminiscence of the longer version. So I set out to re-read the book, something I usually never do. I have to say, I was impressed by it. As the author states in the introduction, if you read it before, you won't find the characters behaving differently, but you will find them doing a lot more things.

I found that I really liked the expansion of some of the sub-characters, going into a little more detail with how some of them arrived to their final destinations, be it Boulder, Colorado or Las Vegas, Nevada.

For those of you who have never heard of the book or seen the TV movie, here is the briefest of synopses. The government is working on a super-virus in a restricted area of the U.S. The virus gets leaked into a controlled area, but the base is immediately shut down as to prevent it from speading. Unfortunately one security guard does manage to get out.

This one security guard manages to spread this extremely communicable disease to others and like that commercial from days gone by, they spread it to friends and those freinds spread it to more friends until there is aultimately about a 99% death rate among the population. For some reason, the remaining 1% are immune, and begin having strange dreams about a dark man and an old black woman. These are the two marshalling forces that bring about a good vs. evil battle to which the finale is ultimately drawn.

I think I would have rated the original a 10 if I had been doing this blog back then. As it is I am giving this expanded version 8½ stars.

Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut

The sage of many years for the post-WWII era, Vonnegut, who passed away last year was in his writings very anti-war, and in this group of stories it is very evident where he stands. The first piece, a letter presumably written by him shortly after his release from a German POW camp in Dresden is one of the most powerful pieces. To hear him describe the savagery of his own country's troops is jarring to say the least.

One of my favorite pieces is a story about the coming of Americans to a European city after years of that city's occupation by the Nazis and the Russians. Told from the point of view of one of the residents, a furniture maker, the commanding officer appears not much different than any of the previous occupiers to the narrator.

In all of these stories, there is a seething sense of hatred towards the military. His socialist tendencies come out well in these stories, and right-wingers in the political spectrum will probably hate the book. Tough ****. I think its a wonderful posthumous book.

Rate this one 8 stars.