Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from his fourth school. Rather than go straight home, he spends a few days drifting around New York City — arguing with taxi drivers, visiting his little sister, getting into scrapes — all while railing against the “phoniness” of the adult world and searching, not very successfully, for something real.

Salinger’s 1951 novel is shorter than its reputation suggests, and breezier too. Holden’s voice is the whole thing — cynical, funny, occasionally insufferable, and underneath it all, achingly lonely. It reads less like a novel than like someone talking at you, and somehow that works completely. The complaint it makes — that growing up means performing a version of yourself you don’t believe in — hasn’t dated at all.

A genuine classic. Surprised by how much I enjoyed it.