Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and Bookish. This week I present to you a list of ten books and series that I loved, but I don’t talk about nearly enough! Have you read any of these novels? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

10.) The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

“…the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them.”

Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with “cynical adolescent.” Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he’s been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists. His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation.

Rating: 5/5
Comment: I’m not a huge fan of classics, so I was a bit skeptical going into The Catcher in the Rye, but I absolutely fell in love with Holden Caulfield. He’s a poster boy for the misanthropic, angst ridden youth of the world, which means he’s a character I could fully relate to when I read it.