“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”

-from chapter 3 of Catcher In The Rye.

I’ll resume howling at the moon tomorrow probably, but today I just wanted to share a chuckle with you not only that someone is attempting a “sequel” to J. D. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye, but that Salinger himself is coming out of his intense decades long seclusion to try and fight it.

Here’s the description of the sequel from Gawker:

60 Years Later, by a mysterious guy living in Sweden (!) named John David California, imagines Holden Caufield as a 76-year-old escapee from a retirement home wandering the streets of New York City. Salinger’s lawyers argue that “the sequel is not a parody and it does not comment upon or criticise the original. It is a ripoff pure and simple.”

Wow. That sounds like a very special kind of bad. Way to go, John David California. Also, your nom de plume is a bad “homage” to Jerome David, but also sounds like the lamest porn name ever. But it leaves me amazed, thinking about it, that someone hasn’t crossed that uncrossable line and bastardized a movie version of the classic book. I guess I’m pleased that some things are still sacred?