Okay, I’ll admit it’s a tiny little square below. But it’s worth watching. The backstory: Stephen Colbert admits that J.D. Salinger‘s Catcher in the Rye is his least favorite book, “the most important American novel I don’t get.” He prefers the Glass family stories. So he invited Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy’s Life, to convince him otherwise. “You will never convince me,” he warned on the Colbert Book Club. Toby agreed it shouldn’t be taught to kids as mandatory high school reading: “Part of the experience of finding that book is that it felt really subversive reading it.” The adult world is unmasked as “a nest of hypocrisy and phoniness. That’s something you want to find on your own. You don’t want your English teacher to be introducing you to the hypocrisy of adults.” So why doesn’t he, too, prefer the Glass family stories? Toby relaxed back in his chair and presented a rhetorical question: “You like to read sermons all day?” Colbert responded in a beat: “I like to give them.” Who can argue with that?
See it all for yourself:
Tags: J.D. Salinger, Stephen Colbert, Tobias Wolff