Rory Gilmore 52 Book Challenge discussion

Here we go onto book number 2 for the year! The next book that we will be reading and discussing is The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.

This book was referenced in season 2 as well, this time in episode number 8, The Ins and Outs of Inns.

Now even though we are moving away from Franny and Zooey, if anyone is finishing it up now or has a post they'd like to make it's encouraged. The pacing for this challenge is pretty loose so we could end up talking about Franny and Zooey the whole year(although that would be pretty surprising).

Hope everyone is having a great start to 2015 and I look forward to seeing the discussion for The Catcher in the Rye!

Well, after reading The Catcher in the Rye, I feel like it may have been unfair to call Jess a Holden Caulfield. I enjoyed this book, though I have to say that Salinger clearly thought he was more intelligent than the general population and (I know next to nothing about him, except that he said Holden was loosely based off his childhood) he either felt close to a psychotic break or actually went through one.
I felt more for Holden than I did for Franny. His experience was far less calculated and it seemed like a constant problem, especially since Allie died. Franny found a book and chose to have an episode about the religious aspect, whereas Holden just snapped. He had so much trauma and children aren't as resilient as we would like to think. With a semi-absent father and a mother who lost a child and is unable to cope, sending Holden to boarding school was by far the worst thing to happen to him. Was that a normal process in the 1950s? I know my grandparents didn't go to boarding school, but they didn't have 'dough' either, so I'm honestly not sure.
My favorite character was Phoebe. She was a very strong, intelligent little girl. She was the only thing grounding Holden and she knew it.
If anything, Holden reminds me a little of Paris, intelligent and isolated.

I just finished! I enjoyed Salinger's writing style, but I found this book a little more difficult to get through. At first I really couldn't stand Holden, but once his anger subsided and he began to show more how scared and unsure he was I softened a bit towards him.
I really sympathized with his break though, and think that maybe he begins to change after the book. I loved Phoebe too! I think she understood Holden more than he realized.
This is really a great look into the mind of a 16 year old boy who is through a very difficult and emotional time. However, I don't think this is a book I will reread, or wax poetic about. It wasn't just awful though.

I had to skip re-reading this one, mainly because I couldn't find my copy right away. When I read it, I enjoyed it to some degree but I felt like it wasn't written for me at that time -- that someone else somewhere would love this well-written book for what it was. Maybe I'll give it another shot later on.

That said, it is a good, well-written book. I agree that there are some similarities between Paris and Holden, but I think even Rory (and also Franny) had those sensitivities at times to how "fake" Yale and Chilton seemed to her, especially in her lower points. I think the reason why the young characters of Salinger's works and the young adults of Gilmore Girls stick with us as readers/viewers is that their disillusionment is portrayed so well, despite maybe being irritating to read/watch at times. I know this was an issue for me with Jess (and Holden) at the beginning. I think part of it is that his disillusionment/loss of innocence came so much earlier than the other GG characters and jolted everyone around him, including viewers.

The real world education that comes with the inevitable flailing of growing up is done so well with Rory and those around her. It seems to be no accident Salinger's works were mentioned; clearly, the writers knew them well and that helped them make their young characters relatable at all stages, even if they (or you) didn't quite know where they were headed all the time.

If I can say one thing with certainty after the past two books it is this: Salinger had a major beef with Ivy league phonies. I had a hard time getting through this book, but toward the end I did feel mild sympathy for Holden.

While Rory's dig at Jess by calling him Holden was a little extreme in my opinion, he really did hold onto that same attitude you all mentioned previously (disillusionment and anger paired with intelligence) for a lot of the series. The superiority complex while claiming to be sort of the under dog was Jess through and through to me.