Reference: Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger

I read about 1/3 of this book back in the tenth grade when I was very much in love with Franny and Zooey. But for some reason, I did not remember a single detail as I read Nine Stories last week. Even I am guilty of advising students who don't like to sit still and read to try short stories, but I must say it's a pretty dumb advice. I have trouble with short fiction and I suspect I never finished this book in high school because I was just not getting it. Short stories are dense. They are usually bizarre. And I have to admit, sometimes I get to the end and feel nothing. And being as vain as I am, I don't feel a sense of accomplishment that I feel when finished with a book. No no... maybe it's not because I am vain, but because I am so neurotic. I collect and hog. So finishing a book lets me add it to my list, a collection of books read. But I currently don't have an ongoing collection of short stories. If I were to start one, I'd probably like short stories a lot more.

Well, so I liked the book. Some stories I liked more than others. The ones I especially liked were:

A Perfect Day for Bananafish
For Esme--with Love and Squalor
De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period
Teddy


Wow, that's half the book.

Well, my favorite was De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period. I guess I can relate to it the most, this taking detour, having a quarterlife crisis, coming of age story. It helped me indulge both my fantasies about getting an absolutely brand new life, and being an artist. And I absolutely loved the letter he wrote to the nun.... because it was so stupid, so immature, so inappropriate. And because I know the impulse to write a letter like that when I feel very much connected to someone I barely knew. And I am afraid, oh so embarrassed, that I probably have written and email or two like that. I have also received and email or two like that. And of course it made me feel uncomfortable and it's the kind of letter you don't reply to and feel slightly guilty about. I'd say when the guy decides to let the nun go, he became an adult. But that's just me, trying to turn everything into a coming-of-age story.

People--mostly adults, maybe only adults--told me I'd know when I become an adult with no longer a trace left over from adolescence. And well, it had happened. I don't remember the details of it anymore... but maybe it happened a couple of years ago. I distinctly felt adult one day. That childhood was no more. The very air I was breathing felt different. But now I think we never grow up because I don't feel adult anymore. I am just pretending... and reminding myself constantly that I am an adult, independent, responsible for all the mess I make, but none-the-less have to make my own decisions adult. Did people--mostly adults, only the adults--lie to me?

Today, I helped a student write the lamest essay about how a book makes you experience a world different from your own. It was so lame because it is so true. Says Virginia Woolf (to me today):

"The library's always the nicest room in the house," she quoted, and ran her eyes along the books. "the mirror of the soul" books were. ... she considered: Keats and Shelley; Yeats and Donne. Or perhaps not a poem; a life. The life of Garibaldi. The life of Lord Palmerston. Or perhaps not a person's life; a county's. The Antiquities of Durham; The Proceedings of the Archaeological Society of Nottingham. Or not a life at all, but science--Eddington, Darwin, or Jeans.

Between the Acts

Of course she notes that none of these books helps with a toothache, but books are nonetheless magical.