age and CITR

Rachel J Macdonald (macdon50@pilot.msu.edu)
Sat, 21 Feb 1998 10:26:43 -0500 (EST)

What do you think? Is Catcher an age-bound book?--

    I think that one of the greatest aspects of CITR, a feature that makes it
such a masterpiece, is that it gives something different to different ages.  I
read it when I was a freshman in high school, genuinely liked it, but read it
again as a college sophomore and had a completely different read of it, and got
a lot of different things from it.  Another book with this quality, mentioned
previously on this list, is TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.  Different reads are
available at different ages and like all books, as a person grows, they change
and they bring all of those changes to a book.  I don't think that CITR is
"age-bound" but age certainly has a lot to do with the interpretations a reader
makes of it, or any given work for that matter.
Rachel