Death Be Not Proud by, John Gunther. Just finished it.

[SheilaT]

15. It's my observation that young people don't relate

very well to those books. My younger son read Catcher in the Rye in high school and totally hated it. He was pretty articulate about what a complete jerk he thought Holden was, and how nothing in his life connected in any way to my son's life. And, in case this matters, my son was attending a secular private school, although it wasn't a boarding school. Holden and Johnny are children of a particular kind of privilege, and even though one is fictional and the other real, they have a great deal in common in terms of the place they occupied in society in their particular era.

Catcher was published in 1951, so of course Johnny never read it.

I read that book sometime in the early or mid-1970s, as a young adult. I was somewhat underwhelmed by it, but I recall thinking I was supposed to like it, as it was such a classic. In the years since, I've gotten better at figuring out my own opinion about things, even the ones that everyone else seems to love.

I don't think my older son had to read it. Same school, but four years older and the assigned books change from year to year.