Cannonball - Book 17

With Love and Squalor: 14 Writers Respond to the Work of J.D. Salinger edited by Kip Kotzen and Thomas Beller

This book was pretty uneven, quality-wise.  There are a few essays that I really loved--Amy Sohn's "Franny and Amy" and Thomas Beller's "The Salnger Weather" were standouts--but overall the bad outweighed the good.  Maybe the problem is that, while I like Salinger, I have never been able to understand people who looooooove Salinger.  I wanted to, I really did.  When I read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time in grade nine I guess I was expecting it to change my life or something, because that is what everyone said would happen, and instead it just turned out to be a novel I more or less enjoyed.  Maybe I didn't read closely enough, or maybe I was not feeling sufficiently alienated.  I don't know.

So, the essays were a little hit or miss.  Whatever.  The part of the book I really want to talk about is the writing in the margins.  Here are some things I know about the person who wrote in the margins of this book: 1) She has good penmanship (in a feminine, curly way, so I am going to assume the comment writer is a woman), and 2) She is an asshole.

I don't know who this woman is, but I hate her.  First of all, she was writing in a library book, which is uncool.  And second, she was writing stupid, snarky bullshit that wasn't even about the content of the essays.  For example: she circled the word 'demise' on page 20, and wrote in the margin "terrible word choice--it's a legal euphemism for the death of a sovereign--as in "demise of the Crown".  Worst person ever, right?  For one thing, she is using a completely outdated definition of the word 'demise' (yeah, I looked it up), and even if she were right I have no idea why she would have felt the need to write a correction in the margins of a book that doesn't even belong to her.  Is she just showing off for future borrowers?  Her handwriting is all over the book and she never writes a single interesting thing.  She is just arguing semantics with no one in particular.  It is obnoxious as hell.



Page count: 194
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