Judging the book by its author

There was a time when one sought out different and life-changing books. Today, everyone seems to be reading the same new books…

How do you do it? Your colleagues, neighbours, family and friends, how do they all do it? “I follow my nose,” says Dan Rhodes, author of Gold, “I am always on the hunt for the next book that's going to rock my world … my favourite thing is still going into a shop and coming out with something I'd never heard of. ” But if you stand in any bookstore, you're unlikely to see many people using their noses, they just head straight for the “new” Salman Rushdie or the “latest” Chetan Bhagat or the “most recent” Shobhaa De or the “new bestseller” from Paulo Coelho: it's a matter of judging every book by its author.

Seeking questions
I remember that in the days when I first began to buy books, almost all the people I knew were looking for one that would somehow alter the way life felt or the way they conducted themselves in life, because we believed that books could change life. Maybe that was the Catcher effect — most of us had read Catcher in the Rye and Salinger's other books in our late teens, at the same time that we were beginning to buy our own books; Salinger undid everything we had believed about writing and heroes and even about reading. So maybe when we searched long and hard in bookstores — reading page after page of the book, not content with what the flaps were saying — we were looking for something that could stand up to Catcher, a book that could make us look at what else life was about.

Full report here Hindu

Good bye, phoney world

Against the troubled backdrop of J.D. Salinger's life, The Catcher in the Rye stands out like a shining gem

So finally we may know the answer to one of those enigmatic questions which are the life-blood of the literary world: Was J.D. Salinger writing away all these years that he hid himself in his New Hampshire fastness and if so, what? The man who turned his back on literary success and adulation, vanished Garbo-like into iron-clad privacy and thus became a living legend, died on January 27 at the age of 91. And that fact entitles us to make an exception to the general rule of not repeating writers in this column.

Salinger's allure is as much due to his only novel, the 1951 angst-ridden classic of American adolescence - The Catcher in the Rye- as to his obsessive desire for privacy. When the book that still sells a quarter of a million copies every year, was coming out in the US, Salinger was hiding in London. He wanted his photograph removed from the dust jacket of subsequent editions, instructed his agents to burn fan mail and come 1953, moved into a wooded compound in New Hampshire where he was to stay till his death last month. A bit strange for a man who, in his college days, had boasted of his literary talents and ambitions, announcing that he would write The Great American Novel.

But the world doesn't let anyone be, least of all people who shun it. Two self-serving memoirs, one by Joan Maynard with whom he had an affair when he was 53 and she 18 and the second by his daughter, Margaret Salinger violated his privacy with revelations and allegations about his behaviour. He also had to wage legal battles to stop an unauthorized biography and an obvious Catcher rip-off. And already people are visiting Cornish, New Hampshire to be told that he was actually no recluse, but a friendly townsman, who liked to come to church dinners.

Full report here Hindu