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In the last few years I've been doing a self-induced, self-defined required reading course. Basically, I've taken the syllabi from all the English courses I've been in since my sophomore year of high school, and begun to read the books that I never actually read in class. (My freshman high school course still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.)

Probably if I'd read these novels when I was supposed to, I never would have thought to pick them up again. So I'm pretty happy that I was a poor student. Recently I've finished The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Anna Karenina (Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, aka Oprah edition), Don Quixote (Edith Grossman translation), The Great Gatsby, and a bunch of others. Have I mentioned how smart and well-read I am? It dawned on me that these were assigned in English class because they actually are Great Books, not month-long torture devices meant to make kids go crazy.

Right now I'm on a J.D. Salinger kick. I'd liked Catcher in the Rye, but not in a way that was overwhelming. So I've kind of always wondered what all the buzz was about. Now I understand.

I think it's a travesty that Salinger will be remembered for Catcher in the Rye. (Anyone who claims Franny and Zooey will be his legacy is, I assure you, a snob like me.) This calls to mind Nabokov's response to an interviewer who asked which book he wants to be remembered for: "The one I am writing or rather dreaming of writing." (Then, I imagine wistfully) "Actually, I shall be remembered by Lolita."

While, yeah, the voice in Catcher was probably revolutionary at the time, and it's a great, quick read, I think it's kids' stuff compared to his stories about the Glass family. Briefly, these include Franny and Zooey, Seymour: An Introduction and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and the short stories "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," "Down at the Dinghy," and perhaps any of the last three stories in Nine Stories, which I'm in the process of reading. Ooh - and the semi-rare "Hapworth 16, 1924," which I also haven't read.

Also briefly: The Glasses are a post-Jewish family of intellectuals, parented by veritable non-intellectuals, all of whom are fluent in that obscure language Manhattanese. There are, I think, seven children, all of whom have some sort of condescending respect for each other, and all of whom most of all revere the eldest brother, Seymour, whom we see only once in 'real time' (i.e. not in narrative retrospect), in "Bananafish," the story in which he kills himself.

Salinger's 90th birthday, assuming he's still alive somewhere in New Hampshire, fell on last Thursday. Because the publishing elite, such as myself, wasn't invited to any sort of party, the anniversary occasioned a smattering of articles and essays about the author, his elusiveness, and his legacy. ("Why draw attention to a man who wants for nothing but to be left alone?" asks the Critical Mass blog.) A couple of them hint at some long-awaited posthumous publications. Others futilely chide him for being so reclusive.

I take issue with this one from the Times. Written by Charles McGrath, he criticizes Salinger's spiritual leanings:

In general what has dated most in Mr. Salinger's writing is not the prose - much of the dialogue, in the stories especially and in the second half of "Franny and Zooey," still seems brilliant and fresh - but the ideas. Mr. Salinger's fixation on the difference between "phoniness," as Holden Caulfield would put it, and authenticity now has a twilight, '50s feeling about it. It's no longer news, and probably never was.

Call me sentimental. But I say screw the dialogue. There are six authors a year who get lauded for having better ears than Salinger and Hemingway. (Richard Price took the prize in 2008, and I'm like okay maybe, but I doubt it.) And frankly, some of Salinger's prose is less than crisp. I think it's his ideas that set him apart.

F and Z has its focus point on a little religious handbook called "The Way of a Pilgrim"; Nine Stories' epigraph is from a Zen Koan. Seymour is something of a religious scholar. But it's Salinger's treatment of the religious theme that makes the books so endearing. All the Glasses - and Holden Caulfield, too - are so damn sincere and desperate about finding a meaningful existence that, even when Salinger pokes fun at them a little (Franny passes out in a religious fever; Holden gets angry and amusingly drunk), even their stumbling can be seen as stumbling in the right direction.

I should probably stop right here. But as long as there's speculation going on, can I bring up the probably too obvious theme of pedophilia in Salinger's work? You've got Holden's strange obsession with his younger sister. The most arresting scene in "Zooey" is when the title character looks out the window at a schoolgirl playing with her dog. Whatever plot "Bananafish" has is centered on Seymour's encounter with a young girl who's "wearing a canary-yellow two-piece bathing suit, one piece of which she would not actually be needing for another nine or ten years." In "For Esmé - With Love and Squalor," a soldier makes promises to a haughty thirteen-year-old girl whom he describes too often as a 'young woman.'

My reading of all this is probably tainted by decades of fear about child pornography and prostitution rings that constantly make headlines. In literature and movies, I'm immediately suspicious of any non-parental adult-child relationship. Thanks a lot, society. Anyone seen the movie Doubt?

Still, what's this all about:

In life and love, Salinger has tended towards younger souls also. He was 36 when he married his second wife, Claire Douglas, when she was an undergraduate student. He was later to have an affair with Joyce Maynard, whom he also met when she was studying. (She was 18, he was 53.) Since the late 1980s, he has been married to Colleen O'Neill, a former nurse 40 years his junior.

I bring all this up to bolster Salinger's legacy: If he were thinking of entering society again, and then he read this blog post, maybe he'd go back into seclusion. I, and others like me, justify his hermetic leanings. And so I reiterate: Actually, Salinger shall be remembered by Lolita.