Stereotyping People by Their Favorite Author

Yes I know stereotyping is frowned upon but I found this really interesting post on StumbleUpon and I couldn't help but post it here. I've made a few alterations to the original list which can be found here.

• J.D. Salinger
• Kids who don’t fit in.
• Stephenie Meyer
• People within the age group of 12-18 who lost faith in human love too early and now put their trust in shiny vampires
• J.K. Rowling
• People who detest their school.
• Jodi Picoult
• Your mom when she’s at her time of the month.
• Leo Tolstoy
• Guys I want to date.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Guys I want to sleep with.
• David Foster Wallace
• Confirmed 90’s literati.
• Jane Austen (or Bronte Sisters)
• Girls who made out with other girls in college when they were going through a “phase”.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• People who can start a fire.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• People who used to sleep so heavy that they would pee their pants.
• Charles Dickens
• Ninth graders who think they’re going to be authors someday but end up in marketing.
• Mark Twain
• Proud bastards
• Anne Rice
• People who appreciate real vampires
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Men who live in their mother’s basements.
• John Grisham
• Doctors who went to medical schools in the Dominican Republic.
• Dan Brown
• People who used to get lost in supermarkets when they were kids.
• Nicholas Sparks
• Women who are usually constipated.
• Sylvia Plath
• Suicidal girls who keep journals
• George Orwell
• Conspiracy theorists
• Harper Lee
• People who have read only one book in their life and it was To Kill A Mockingbird (and it was their assigned reading in the ninth grade).
• Ernest Hemingway
• Tough army men with a soft spot for stirring prose.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• People who get adjustable-rate mortgages and party hard.
• Vladimir Nabokov
• Men who use words like ‘dubious’ and ‘tenacity’.
• Lewis Carroll
• People who move to Thailand after high school for the drug scene.
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Men who can’t lie but will instead be silent if they know you don’t want to hear the truth.
• Stieg Larsson
• Girls who are too frightened to go skydiving.
• Virginia Woolf
• Girls who like talking about death with their suicidal friends.
• Salman Rushdie
• People who google images of Padma Lakshmi late at night. (True story!)
• James Joyce
• People who do not like John Cusack movies.
• Oscar Wilde
• People who can’t resist anything. See also: people who claim they’re going to change but never do!
• Franz Kafka
• People with daddy issues.

Any other author you want to see in the list?

The 'Goddamn' world of J.D. Salinger.

American novelist, J.D. Salinger (1919-2010)

May it be Holden Caulfield from 'The catcher in the rye' or the members of the Glass family from 'Franny and Zooey', Salinger's characters share a disillusionment about the world they live in surrounded by 'phony' adults. Every character in Salinger's book is not your regular, conformist, loveable or (hate-able for that matter) character and they are often hard to relate too. You either love them or you don't. Period.

After being completely smitten by Salinger's controversial book 'The catcher in the rye', I was interested in exploring his other works. Franny and Zooey, a popular hit amongst this writer's fans proved to be a complex piece of work bearing the authors distinguished style of writing.

It's a hard read but at the end, its worth it. Its not a plot-driven novel, instead it is fueled by lengthy dialogues that sometime stretch to pages. In this novel, Salinger's gift of eloquent and real dialogues is exposed in all its brilliance. The dialogues are sharp, witty, honest and never boring. This is real writing in my opinion. Not a word more or a word less. 

While reading this book you get a feeling of being trapped in the freakish world of the Glass family where frustrations, contradictions and a sense of loss run high. You are absorbed into unusual settings where intense conversations take place between the main characters. Franny is the perfectly written first chapter in the book which introduces us to a pretty college student Franny Glass who is on the brink of an emotional and spiritual collapse.

"It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so--I don't know--not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid, necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless--and sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way."-Franny

However, the reasons for her world rejecting attitude and  breakdown are fully revealed in the second and last chapter of the book Zooey. Here, we see Franny's older brother, Zooey's morbidity and humor, his sense of being doomed by their elder brothers and enlightenment. 

"We're freaks, that's all. Those two bastards got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards, that's all. We're the tattooed lady, and we're never going to have a minute's peace, the rest of our lives, until everybody else is tattooed, too."-Zooey

I was gripped by Franny in the beginning only to see Zooey steal the spotlight and be captivated by his perspectives deeper into the book.

The book is perceived by some as a religious novel, however in the words of the narrator, this offering is '... a compound, a multiple, love story, pure and complicated.' This is J.D. Salinger at his best. 

Simple words- Memorable sentences.

A couple of months back I started a list. A list where I'd jot down the the opening and closing sentence or paragraph of a good book. Here are a few that gripped my attention and compelled me to note them down.

1. The catcher in the rye by J.D. Salinger: 

First paragraph: "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

(This first paragraph was enough to capture my attention. There is a seriousness in the casually written lines which set the tone for the entire novel. Refreshing, to say the least).

Last sentence: "Don't ever tell anybody anything, if you do, you start missing everybody."

(By the time I finished the novel, I had fallen in love with the narrator. This last sentence was a perfect ending to a brilliant novel).

2. The metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

First sentence: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from unsettling dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin."


(This powerful first sentence draws in the reader and lets his/her imagination wonder for a while as to how the character transformed and what has he changed into overnight?)


I saved the best for last! 
3. Love in the time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

First sentence: "It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."

(Lyrical. Nostalgic. Magical! The first sentence is exactly what you'd expect from a literary genius.)

Last paragraph:  "And how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn coming and going?’ he asked.  Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven day and nights.  ‘Forever,’ he said.”

(Okay so I really can not contain my love for this book. The romance genre has never really caught my fancy, this was my first love story and oh boy! did it make me go bonkers!? lol. I would just not stop talking about it. The eloquent narrative and its beautiful prose completely immersed me into the world of Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza. The last sentence is a memorable line summing up the triumph of irrevocable love.)