Book Recommendation/discussion General

Into the Wild I think appeals to a very specific type of person. And I really can't hate John Green. He's good at what he does, which is writing somewhat pretentious teen novels. I don't really care for young adult fiction, and I haven't for ages, but it was the type of book I think 13 year old me would have hidden behind a copy of The Communist Manifesto and secretly enjoyed.

Salinger wrote:At first piecemeal, then point-blank, he let his attention be drawn to a little scene that was being acted out sublimely, unhampered by writers and directors and producers, five stories below the window and across the street. A fair-sized maple tree stood in front of the girls' private school-one of four or five trees on that fortunate side of the street-and at the moment a child of seven or eight, female, was hiding behind it. She was wearing a navy-blue reefer and a tam that was very nearly the same shade of red as the blanket on the bed in van Gogh's room at Aries. Her tam did, in fact, from Zooey's vantage point, appear not unlike a dab of paint. Some fifteen feet away from the child, her dog - a young dachshund, wearing a green leather collar and leash - was sniffing to find her, scurrying in frantic circles, his leash dragging behind him. The anguish of separation was scarcely bearable for him, and when at last he picked up his mistress's scent, it wasn't a second too soon. The joy of reunion, for both, was immense. The dachshund gave a little yelp, then cringed forward, shimmying with ecstasy, till his mistress, shouting something at him, stepped hurriedly over the wire guard surrounding the tree and picked him up. She said a number of words of praise to him, in the private argot of the game, then put him down and picked up his leash, and the two walked gaily west, toward Fifth Avenue and the Park and out of Zooey's sight. Zooey reflexively put his hand on a crosspiece between panes of glass, as if he had a mind to raise the window and lean out of it to watch the two disappear. It was his cigar hand, however, and he hesitated a second too long. He dragged on his cigar. "God damn it," he said, "there are nice things in the world-and I mean nice things. We're all such morons to get so sidetracked. Always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our little egos." Behind him, just then, Franny blew her nose with guileless abandon; the report was considerably louder than might have been expected from so fine and delicate appearing an organ. Zooey turned around to look at her, somewhat censoriously.