Paul Newman and a ride home
A friend told me today that she's never read S.E. Hinton's "The Outsiders," which I found just plain hard to believe. But she's 20 and I'm now ancient at 33 and there's a real generation gap there, I guess. It's funny that we even got on the subject because this past Monday my niece, who's 36, and I started talking about the books on our junior high reading lists in the mid-'80s and how we bet some of them were probably long gone today since American parents don't want their kids to suffer even a hangnail, much less read a novel about poor teens with little parental supervision in Oklahoma who get in gang fights with switchblades, run away from home and fight with rich, clean-cut, socially-powerful but morally corrupt Socs.So I told my friend that I'd loan her my absolutely worn-out copy of "The Outsiders" to read. And hopefully re-read. Because everyone should remember this opening sentence: "When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home."
posted by rekkidbraka @ 9:34 PM
11 Comments:
I'm gonna back you up on this one. I'm 23 and I read the Outsiders. And I saw the movie. And then I read it again. And again. Because I was obsessed. So really, there's no excuse.
Although, to be fair, I didn't read it for school. However, my friend's junior high assigned "Forever" by Judy Blume and then I think she did a book report on "Wifey," and her dramatic reading in class was the scandal of the century. I'm pretty sure those books are gone from any school reading lists.
I've never read it. ::duck::
I've never been much of a reader myself. I always needed an impetus to actually do a lot of reading. When I read something it's usually because I have some vested interest in the subject. For instance, the last non-cookbook I read was Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. I've been thinking about taking on the Harry Potter series just to see what the giant hullabaloo is about.
Jeez, what have you done to invoke the wrath of the comment spammers? Annoying little buggers.
I have not read The Outsiders either. But now I suppose I must.
You know, when you first see that you got 16 comments on your post about "The Outsiders," you think "Gee, I know that book really struck a chord with tons of people but man..."
And then you realize that a gaggle of anonymous ad geeks turned your blog into a virtual mosh pit for their Spamapalooza '05 Summer Tour. I just deleted 11 spam posts. Grrr...
If you've never read "The Outsiders," you really should. I recommend buying the way everyone should buy "The Outsiders" -- from your favorite, musty-smelling used book store. Bonus points if you find either one of the really old editions with the guys looking hippiefied on the cover or if, like me, you find the "movie edition" with the cool drawing of Matt Dillon, C. Thomas Howell, Rob Lowe, Diane Lane and Ralph Macchio on the front with the tagline "Now a major motion picture by Francis Ford Coppola." (Confession: I stole mine from my cousin back in the day.)
Like Manta, I didn't have to read "The Outsiders" for school, either; just read it on my own after ripping it off. But everyone else at school had to read it. Since I didn't and I read it for pleasure, maybe that's why I still love to read it over and over and over.
Wow. You get a lot of trolls in these here parts. And they're really weird. Some of that stuff looks like it was translated from Japanese. "You are making good job"? Huh?
On Livejournal there's a way of preventing spammers from commenting hidden in between some techno babble in the account info. Maybe blogger has something similar?
You could disable anonymous comments: that might take care of a few.
Heh. I feel so powerful now.
Just for that, I'm going to forward all telemarketers calling me at the dinner hour your way, Janna. Enjoy!
I just realized this post was made before I was born 😂
I'm 16 and I had to read The Outsiders for school, and everyone I know did too. We even watched the movie in school. Definitely not losing popularity any time soon.
And we read it back in middle school
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