The 306 Greatest Books #6 - The Catcher in the Rye

I am going back and posting all of my previous book reviews so that they are listed on my site in chronological order. The reviews are dated for the time when I read the book, hence the reason many of them will be listed for times before this website existed. 

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. This book can be found on the Observer and BBC Book Lists.

The Catcher in the Rye seems to have been relegated to "cult" status stemming from the obsessive love of the book that Mark David Chapman had for the book. Chapman is well known as being the murderer of the beloved John Lennon. Whether the book deserves this cult status is up for debate but I personally don't understand it. The book is a rather depressing novel about a 16 year-old adolescent, just kicked out of prep school, and learning to deal with the adult world of "phonies." It's a very well written book and really enjoyable to read. However, it has been a long time since I have read the book, so I will place this on my must reread list to hopefully be able to solve this cult classic mystery for myself.

The 306 Greatest Books #5 - Animal Farm

I am going back and posting all of my previous book reviews so that they are listed on my site in chronological order. The reviews are dated for the time when I read the book, hence the reason many of them will be listed for times before this website existed. 

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is Animal Farm by George Orwell. This book can be found on the BBC and My Book Lists.

I had read Animal Farm in high school, like so many other great books, but I was able to go back and reread it as part of my official 100 Greatest Books read through. I find this novel fantastic and insightful, especially knowing what I know now about communist Russia and society as a whole. The book is very fast paced (I read it in about 2 hours) and it's a fun read. The story is like a children's book, which had been forced through a harsh realism filter. In essence, the story is about a group of farm animals who find that their Master has gone over the line one too many times and they take over the farm. They run the farm well as equals (at first), but then dissension starts to appear when the two "leaders" start to fight and one ousts the other from the farm. Orwell's portrayal of communistic society is chilling and he makes it understandable both to the point of how this can happen and why people let it happen. The concept of the book can be generalized in these famous lines near the end: "All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others." Definitely on my must read list.

The 306 Greatest Books #4 - The Great Gatsby

I am going back and posting all of my previous book reviews so that they are listed on my site in chronological order. The reviews are dated for the time when I read the book, hence the reason many of them will be listed for times before this website existed. 

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This book can be found on the Sybervision, Observer, BBC, Zane Top 10, and My Book Lists.

I had originally read The Great Gatsby sometime in high school, but it was a book that I felt the urge to at some time revisit. This past year (2026), I have both seen the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and seen the Broadway musical. So I undertook to revisit the novel because both of those stories, were surprisingly nearly identical, and very different from the story that sat in the dustbins of my memory. Listening to the audiobook of the story I discovered that this is a very, very short novel and that the reason that the movie and Broadway musical were so nearly identical is because there isn't much extra fluff to the story. They adapt the story nearly flawlessly, minus some addendums towards the end that were skipped or glossed over, and some characterizations that were altered. The story is amazingly poignant, especially today. It is a dual story, where one of the stories is about the glitter and glam of the 1920's and how the rich were overly "stuffed" and detached from the working class people of the world. And while they sometimes entered into the everyday suffering of the lower classes, they always stood apart. And Gatsby was that crossover, a kid of the lower classes who was determined to raise himself up, and eventually found a girl, Daisy, for which he strived to do it for. But the second story line is about everyone's past and trying to live in it while the future moves on around us. Gatsby could never let go of the past. He spent his life trying to regain what was lost, to the point that he wanted to reset his relationship with Daisy to their historical point of separation. It is what ended up getting him killed in and leaves a note that the past is the past for a reason, and we all need to live in the present. I liked this book upon revisiting it far more than I expected to. The story is well written and the language used evokes the sophistication that Gatsby was trying to evoke. The story was also very tight, that sometimes I would miss a line while listening to the book and have to jump back because the story wasn't making sense. In one instance, someone had shown shown up that wasn't there before, but I had missed two words in a sentence that heralded his arrival. This story, at times, moved at a lightning pace. Overall, I greatly enjoyed this one and have placed it on my Must Read List. 

The 306 Greatest Books #3 - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

I am going back and posting all of my previous book reviews so that they are listed on my site in chronological order. The reviews are dated for the time when I read the book, hence the reason many of them will be listed for times before this website existed. 

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. This book can be found on the Sybervision, Norwegian, Observer, and the Zane Top 10 Book Lists.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of the primary books known both for being a school age required reading book and also one of the essential "banned books". I had read this while in school and have gone back to the book some thirty-years later. I can see the importance of this work, especially at the time. The book was written shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War, a time while our country was still healing and learning how to move on, however the book itself is set sometime before the war. Slavery is still very prevalent but the feelings on slavery could be felt to start shifting within the novel. And we see this shift most aptly in the character of Huck Finn. He goes from someone who is set out to do the right thing, to realizing that maybe the actual right thing to do isn't what is considered right by society. It is a startling change of theme from the more child fun-loving centric story from the previous novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, who also plays a pivotal role towards the end of Huck Finn. However, the character of Tom Sawyer truly is insufferable, and he ends up drawing out the conclusion of the story far longer than theoretically it should have gone. Huck Finn is also notoriously known for its prolific use of the "N word". And oh my word, I didn't realize until listening to it on audiobook, how truly prolific it was within the story. It is jarring to hear it now-a-days just thrown around so nonchalantly and it is rather disconcerting. Do I understand the contemporary usage of the word? Yes I do. Do I agree that even in this context it is still a degrading word to be used? Most definitely. It is this treatment of Black people within the book that makes this such a hard book to recommend but such an important book to study. While I do think that people should have read it, I can't in good conscious recommend it myself.