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[Pelbagai]
CARI (e)BOOK CLUB: sila jawab KUIZ
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Catcher in the rye 朖D Salinger
First review.
This book has been steeped in controversy since it was banned in America after it's first publication. John Lennon's assassin, Mark Chapman, asked the former Beatle to sign a copy of the book earlier in the morning of the day that he murdered Lennon. Police found the book in his possession upon apprehending the psychologically disturbed Chapman. However, the book itself contains nothing that could be attributed with leading Chapman to act as he did - it could have been any book that he was reading the day he decided to kill John Lennon - and as a result of the fact that it was The Catcher in the Rye, a book describing a nervous breakdown, media speculated widely about the possible connection. This gave the book even more notoriety. So what is The Catcher in the Rye actually about?
Superficially the story of a young man's expulsion from yet another school, The Catcher in the Rye is in fact a perceptive study of one individual's understanding of his human condition. Holden Caulfield, a teenager growing up in 1950s New York, has been expelled school for poor achievement once again. In an attempt to deal with this he leaves school a few days prior to the end of term, and goes to New York to 'take a vacation' before returning to his parents' inevitable wrath. Told as a monologue, the book describes Holden's thoughts and activities over these few days, during which he describes a developing nervous breakdown, symptomised by his bouts of unexplained depression, impulsive spending and generally odd, erratic behaviour, prior to his eventual nervous collapse.
However, during his psychological battle, life continues on around Holden as it always had, with the majority of people ignoring the 'madman stuff' that is happening to him - until it begins to encroach on their well defined social codes. Progressively through the novel we are challenged to think about society's attitude to the human condition - does society have an 'ostrich in the sand' mentality, a deliberate ignorance of the emptiness that can characterise human existence? And if so, when Caulfield begins to probe and investigate his own sense of emptiness and isolation, before finally declaring that he world is full of 'phonies' with each one out for their own phony gain, is Holden actually the one who is going insane, or is it society which has lost it's mind for failing to see the hopelessness of their own lives?
When we are honest we can see within ourselves suppressed elements of the forces operating within Holden Caulfield, and because of that I would recommend this thought provoking novel as a fascinating and enlightening description of our human condition. However, beware... for that very reason it is not comfortable reading.
Second review.
In J.D. Salinger's brilliant coming-of-age novel, Holden Caulfield, a seventeen year old prep school adolescent relates his lonely, life-changing twenty-four hour stay in New York City as he experiences the phoniness of the adult world while attempting to deal with the death of his younger brother, an overwhelming compulsion to lie and troubling sexual experiences.
Salinger, whose characters are among the best and most developed in all of literature has captured the eternal angst of growing into adulthood in the person of Holden Caulfield. Anyone who has reached the age of sixteen will be able to identify with this unique and yet universal character, for Holden contains bits and pieces of all of us. It is for this very reason that The Catcher in the Rye has become one of the most beloved and enduring works in world literature.
As always, Salinger's writing is so brilliant, his characters so real, that he need not employ artifice of any kind. This is a study of the complex problems haunting all adolescents as they mature into adulthood and Salinger wisely chooses to keep his narrative and prose straightforward and simple.
This is not to say that The Catcher in the Rye is a straightforward and simple book. It is anything but. In it we are privy to Salinger's genius and originality in portraying universal problems in a unique manner. The Catcher in the Rye is a book that can be loved and understood on many different levels of comprehension and each reader who experiences it will come away with a fresh view of the world in which they live.
A work of true genius, images of a catcher in the rye are abundantly apparent throughout this book.
While analyzing the city raging about him, Holden's attention is captured by a child walking in the street "singing and humming." Realizing that the child is singing the familiar refrain, "If a body meet a body, comin' through the rye," Holden, himself, says that he feels "not so depressed."
The title's words, however, are more than just a pretty ditty that Holden happens to like. In the stroke of pure genius that is Salinger, himself, he wisely sums up the book's theme in its title.
When Holden, whose past has been traumatic, to say the least, is questioned by his younger sister, Phoebe, regarding what he would like to do when he gets older, Holden replies, "Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going. I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."
In this short bit of dialogue Salinger brilliantly exposes Holden's deepest desire and expounds the book's theme. Holden wishes to preserve something of childhood innocence that gets hopelessly lost as we grow into the crazy and phony world of adulthood.
The theme of lost innocence is deftly explored by Salinger throughout the book. Holden is appalled when he encounters profanity scrawled on the walls of Phoebe's school, a school that he envisions protecting and shielding children from the evils of society.
When Holden gives his red hunting cap to Phoebe to wear, he gives it to her as a shield, an emblem of the eternal love and protectiveness he feels for her.
Near the beginning of the book, Holden remembers a girl he once knew, Jane Gallagher, with whom he played checkers. Jane, he remembers, "wouldn't move any of her kings," and action Holden realizes to be a metaphor of her naivete. When Holden hears that his sexually experienced prep school roommate had a date with Jane, he immediately starts a fight with him, symbolically protecting Jane's innocence.
More sophisticated readers might question the reasons behind Holden's plight. While Holden's feelings are universal, this character does seem to be a rather extreme example. The catalyst for Holden's desires is no doubt the death of his younger brother, Allie, a bright and loving boy who died of leukemia at the age of thirteen. Holden still feels the sting of Allie's death acutely, as well as his own, albeit undeserved, guilt, in being able to do nothing to prevent Allie's suffering.
The only reminder Holden has of Allie's shining but all-too-short life, is Allie's baseball mitt which is covered with poems Allie read while standing in the outfield. In a particularly poignant moment, Holden tells us that this is the glove he would want to use to catch children when they fall from the cliff of innocence.
In an interesting, but trademark, Salinger twist, Holden distorts the Robert Burns poem that provides the book's title. Originally, it read, "If a body meet a body, comin' through the rye." Holden distorts the word "meet" into "catch." This is certainly not the first time Holden is guilty of distortion; indeed he is a master at it.
This distortion, however, shows us how much Allie's death has affected Holden and also how much he fears his own fall from innocence, the theme that threads its way throughout the whole of the book.
By this amazing book's end, we must reach the conclusion that there are times when we all need a "catcher in the rye." We are, indeed, blessed if we have one.
[ Last edited by Hamyhaireen at 10-9-2005 11:07 AM ] |
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 hi guys!!
da lama tak masuk menjenguk sini......takde masa...teramat lah bz.....tapi bila tak bz..porem buat hal plak...haiz...
now dont even have time to read any books......balik keje jer da lepakz.....:cry: |
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catcher in the rye , very interesting.will try to put it in this weeks quota of books.. |
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Author Weekly - Judy Blume -
Since I was reading her book Summer Sister by Judy Blume, I would like to know more about her.
Her writing cabin by the sea.
Judy Blume spent her childhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey, making up stories inside her head. She has spent her adult years in many places, doing the same thing, only now she writes her stories down on paper. Adults as well as children will recognize such Blume titles as: Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret; Superfudge; Blubber; Just As Long As We're Together; and Forever. She has also written the novels Wifey, Smart Women, and her latest, Summer Sisters, the New York Times No. 1 bestseller. More than 75 million copies of her books have been sold, and her work has been translated into twenty-something languages. She receives thousands of letters a month from readers of all ages who share their feelings and concerns with her.
Judy received a B.S. in education from New York University in 1961, which named her a Distinguished Alumna in 1996, the same year the American Library Association honored her with the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement. She has won more than ninety awards, none more important than those coming directly from her youngest readers.
She is the founder and trustee of The Kids Fund, a charitable and educational foundation. She serves on the boards of the Author's Guild; the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, where she sponsors an award for contemporary fiction; and the National Coalition Against Censorship, working to protect intellectual freedom. Recently, she edited Places I Never Meant To Be, Original Stories by Censored Writers. Currently, she is working on a book about the irrepressible Fudge.
Judy lives on islands up and down the East Coast with her husband George Cooper, who writes nonfiction. They have three grown children and one incredible grandchild.
Picture Books:
The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo
The Pain and the Great One
Freckle Juice
For Middle Grade readers:
Iggie's House
Blubber
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
Then Again, Maybe I Won't
It's Not the End of the World
Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself
Deenie
Just As Long As We're Together
Here's to You, Rachel Robinson
For Younger Readers, the "Fudge" books:
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
Superfudge
Fudge-a-mania
Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great
Double Fudge
For Young Adults:
Tiger Eyes
Forever
Letters to Judy: What Kids Wish They Could Tell You
Places I Never Meant To Be [Edited by Judy Blume]
For Adult Readers:
Wifey
Smart Women
Summer Sisters |
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//\\ Sehari Sebuah Buku //\\
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
(bought during times warehouse sales. Price rm30. Q in waiting list :cak
From Publishers Weekly
As the title suggests, bestselling author Bryson (In a Sunburned Country) sets out to put his irrepressible stamp on all things under the sun. As he states at the outset, this is a book about life, the universe and everything, from the Big Bang to the ascendancy of Homo sapiens. "This is a book about how it happened," the author writes. "In particular how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since." What follows is a brick of a volume summarizing moments both great and curious in the history of science, covering already well-trod territory in the fields of cosmology, astronomy, paleontology, geology, chemistry, physics and so on. Bryson relies on some of the best material in the history of science to have come out in recent years. This is great for Bryson fans, who can encounter this material in its barest essence with the bonus of having it served up in Bryson's distinctive voice. But readers in the field will already have studied this information more in-depth in the originals and may find themselves questioning the point of a breakneck tour of the sciences that contributes nothing novel. Nevertheless, to read Bryson is to travel with a memoirist gifted with wry observation and keen insight that shed new light on things we mistake for commonplace. To accompany the author as he travels with the likes of Charles Darwin on the Beagle, Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton is a trip worth taking for most readers.
Pro
1.
For me, reading Bill Bryson's `A short history of nearly everything' is like eating my favourite salted peanuts. I don't want to put too many in my mouth, but at the same time, I just cannot stop eating them, and they have become an addiction. I just don't want to become delirious with all the fat and calories.
Not until Isaac Asimov's `Asimov's Guide to the Sciences' has an author come out with such a vast and entertaining survey of not just modern science for the layman, but also about it's endearing characters, and its relation to society and history. Bryson largely does justice to the grandiose title of the book, churning out an account of almost every significant scientific and technological event that has happened in the last thousand years. A few central themes run through the book; atoms, the universe, chemistry, the earth, evolution, and biology. But in between, Bryson manages to squeeze a truly commendable coterie of characters and events that provide an enriching narrative of connected details. His style is full of humour; I would say that he is another John Casti, albeit maybe less sophisticated but probably more accessible to the average layman. The protagonists that have made science and our modern way of life possible deserve equal attention, and it is to Bryson's credit that he gives due attention to lesser known individuals relatively forgotten by posterity, who were nonetheless responsible for significant advances in science and technology. Many of these directly affect even political affairs. Like Clair Patterson (such an unfairly little known name, that some of the few books that do mention him, think that Clair is a she- I wish she were), who measured the age of the earth and came up with the modern figure of roughly four and a half billion years, a figure that is the boon of scientists and the constant bane of creationists and conservative politicians. Or the women behind the star-gazing men, who contributed much to our understanding of the universe through their common technical prowess of data analysis, but who inevitably gave up their day in the sun to the men.
I truly got the feeling that I was taking in bites of my choice food item when I successively read Bryson's engaging and crisp paragraphs. Each one in a chapter has a common thread running through it, threads which have not been explored by many others and hence are rare and revealing. Coming back to Clair Patterson, Patterson was a geologist who took up the method of estimation of age based on pioneering work done by Ernest Rutherford at the turn of the twentieth century (Interestingly, Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg has noted that after two centuries, what people will remember would not be who was President of the US or Prime Minister of England in 1900, but the fact that Rutherford was making measurements that would one day determine the age of the earth and abolish religious dogma- at least potentially and largely). However, he had immense trouble doing the correct measurements, as the samples he was testing had been contaminated by lead- the same lead that was so wildly popular as an `anti-knock' agent in car engines. (I remember learning this during 12th std.). Catching hold of this thread, Bryson leads us to Thomas Midgeley, who introduced this practice, and who was also responsible for the introduction of CFCs. Not surprisingly, this takes us to the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming etc. In this way, we are led through a panorama of chemistry, geology and biology in this case, with some cogent related tales about the politicking that plagues any action that has to do with the environment. Bryson has several such threads in the book, but they don't become clich |
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Con
2.
Bill Bryson is an excellent writer, no question. He's at once friend and informative, chummy without being condescending. The problem is that Bill Bryson is not a terribly well informed writer.
I read an interview with Bryson in New Scientist not long ago in which he admitted that he really didn't understand a lot of what all these scientists were telling him, and unfortunately that's all too clear in reading this book. As a consequence Bryson gives you a good deal of infomation peppered with some really horrid misunderstandings and errors. I'm reminded in reading "A Short History" of Bryson's book on language, in which he either repeats or invents any number of terribly inaccurate folk etymologies. Also a very readble but terribly inaccurate tome. He's great fun to read on personalities (although the accuracy of some of his characterizations is suspect) and he does have an ear for fascinating trivia, but science takes a back seat to all of this. All too often we get the beginning of an explanation that trails off into a "and anyways it's all very complicated but it's it just fascinating" sort of gee-whiz summary. One suspect that we've just reached the point where Bryson has either lost the thread of understanding or perhaps just decided that he doesn't care to understand something any further.
As enjoyable as Bryson can be to read, I only wish he'd had his manuscript vetted by editors with a solid science background, or better yet, collaboraated with a scientist on the writing. As it is, I can't really recommend this book. The reader interested in how science has shaped the world would do far better to read James Burke's justly well-regarded "Connections". by Michael J Edelman |
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fuh...panjang pulak kali ni.... |
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:music onely I'm so lonely :music:
I have nobody
To call my owwnnn :music:
:music m so lonely im mr. Lonely
I have nobody
:music:To call my owwnnn
Im so lonely :music::music: |
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Originally posted by Hamyhaireen at 13-9-2005 03:10 PM
:musiconely I'm so lonely :music:
I have nobody
To call my owwnnn :music:
:musicm so lonely im mr. Lonely
I have nobody
:music:To call my owwnnn
Im so lonely :music::music:
hello kesianya dia so lonely ... |
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Originally posted by Hamyhaireen at 13-9-2005 03:10 PM
:musiconely I'm so lonely :music:
I have nobody
To call my owwnnn :music:
:musicm so lonely im mr. Lonely
I have nobody
:music:To call my owwnnn
Im so lonely :music::music:
cute...sambil gelak guling2... |
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Kengkawan,
Apa yang dimaksudkan dengan coffee table book? |
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Originally posted by Hamyhaireen at 14-9-2005 10:52 AM
Kengkawan,
Apa yang dimaksudkan dengan coffee table book?
its those big books,hmm tak tau nak describe macam mana lagi .. |
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**** Sehari Sebuah Buku ****
Title : Lullaby : A Novel
Author : Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher: Doubleday (September 17, 2002)
ISBN: 0385504470
Cover :
Review :
From the author of The New York Times bestseller Choke and the cult classic Fight Club, a scintillating, cunningly plotted novel about the ultimate verbal weapon, one that reinvents the supernatural thriller for our times.
Carl Streator is a solitary widower and a forty-ish newspaper reporter who is assigned to do a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In the course of this investigation, he discovers an ominous thread: the presence on the scene of these deaths of the anthology Poems and Rhymes Around the World, all opened to the page where there appears an African chant or "culling song." This song turns out to be lethal when spoken or even thought in anyone's direction補nd once it lodges in Streator's brain, he finds himself becoming an involuntary serial killer. So he teams up with a real estate broker, one Helen Hoover Boyle, who specializes in selling haunted (or "distressed") houses (wonderfully high turnover) and who lost a child to the culling song years before, for a cross-country odyssey. Their goal is to remove all copies of the book from libraries, lest this deadly verbal virus spread and wipe out human life. Accompanying them on this road trip are Helen's assistant, Mona Sabbat, an exquisitely earnest Wiccan, and her sardonic ecoterrorist boyfriend, Oyster, who is running a scam involving fake liability claims and business blackmail. Welcome to the new nuclear family.
On one level, LULLABY is a chillingly pertinent parable about the dangers of psychic infection and control in an era of wildly overproliferated information: "Imagine a plague you catch through your ears . . . imagine an idea that occupies your mind like a city." But it is also a tightly wound thriller with an intriguing premise and a suspenseful plot full of surprising twists and turns. Finally, because it is a Chuck Palahniuk novel, it is a blackly comic tour de force that reinforces his stature as our funniest nihilist and a contemporary seer.
Pro :That is just the case in Chuck Palahniuk's "Lullaby." The book begins by introducing the protagonist, Carl Streator, and his recent journalism assignment, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Throughout his investigations, he finds a single constant: the reoccurrence of a children's book, "Poems and Rhymes from Around the World," open to Page 27, at every death scene. On this page, a culling song is found, an ancient African chant that is deadly to anyone who hears it. Streator memorizes the poem, and with it acquires the ability to unconsciously kill anyone that annoys him even the slightest bit with a single thought. He eventually meets Helen Hoover Boyle, a woman who lost a son to the culling song many years before, and who sells haunted houses for a living. Together, they go on a trip around the country to dispose of every copy of the book in existence in order to put a stop to the threat of this lethal verbal disease.
Chuck Palahniuk wrote "Lullaby" in 2001, following the murder of his father. He was asked to testify about the extent of his suffering in the murderer, Dale Shackleford's, trial, and make a statement about his opinion on the death penalty. He had to decide if he really wanted this man to die. Palahniuk relates his own experiences to the book by stating that "what had started out as a dark, funny book about witchcraft became a story about the constant power struggle that is life." Clearly, Palahniuk's own life experiences played a significant role in the writing of "Lullaby."
For the most part, I enjoyed this book very much. Palahniuk's writing style is very different, and the way he uses details and character developments are extremely effective. I thought that this novel was an outstanding portrait of human nature, pinpointing aspects like the need for power and the longing for acceptance. Overall, "Lullaby" is an exciting and an insightful novel that will appeal to almost any reader by Lauren
Con : Carl Streator, a journalist, and Helen Boyer, a realtor specializing in haunted properties, stumble upon a nursery rhyme book containing a deadly "culling spell" from Africa. Together, they travel across America, ripping the spell from library books, stealing passwords to computer files (hint: every password is "password"), and manage to fornicate while levitating. Huh? Well, if dull, underwriten characters, ludicrous plot twists, and uninspired prose appeal to you, you'll love this novel. by Jonathan. |
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Originally posted by appropos at 14-9-2005 12:42 PM
tu kan dah guling - guling:lol
This is fun..... :love: |
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Category: Belia & Informasi
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Author
Post time 10-9-2005 11:20 PM
Post time 13-9-2005 07:29 PM
