If On the Road’s great, what else have I missed?

This week’s column is dedicated to all those of you who have never read Catcher in the Rye and who, what’s more, are unhealthily proud of the fact. It’s OK: I understand. I was one of you myself till a couple of weeks ago when, at Boy’s insistence, I wearily set aside some of my valuable beach time to plough through this hideously overrated and tiresome ‘classic’.

Why the reluctance? Well, for the obvious reason that Catcher in the Rye — like To Kill a Mockingbird or On the Road — is one of those books you just don’t need to have read because everyone else has done it for you. Including all the thick people who have only ever finished about three books. Or that was how it was when I was at school. The top English sets would study something proper by, say, Austen or Dickens. And the slackers would be given the soft option of doing an American novella, like Catcher or Of Mice and Men.

Besides which, of course, it’s so culturally ubiquitous you know exactly what it’s about already: Holden Caulfield, a moody teenager, tells you his thoughts — and inspires at least three generations of serial killers. Oh, and you get bonus points for knowing that he wears a distinctive red hunting hat, that the reclusive J.D. Salinger wrote little thereafter and that the first line includes a dismissive reference to ‘all that David Copperfield kind of crap’.

Except the actual book is nothing like you think it’s going to be. For a start, it’s set in New York, not the country. (‘Rye’: you’d pictured the dungareed hero, lying sulkily and adolescently in fields of tall grass, plotting how to murder someone, right?) And Holden is a really sweet kid.