I read the pictured books recently back to back, and when I was done with Catcher in the Rye, I thought, that’s the rich boy All the Pretty Horses.

I read All the Pretty Horses first. It follows John Grady Cole and his friend Lacey Rawlins as they travel to Mexico and find work cutting horses at a ranch. They have some trouble and spend time in a Mexican prison. When they get out, Rawlins goes back to Texas, and John Grady stays in Mexico because he fell in love with a girl there, but in the end she does not go back with him to Texas.

Catcher in the Rye follows Holden Caulfield over one weekend in New York while he has a mental breakdown.

They are both sixteen, and both feel as if they don’t have a home. Both stories are set in 1949, and while it seems as if Holden doesn’t love anyone or anything like John Grady does, in the end he sticks around because leaving would upset his little sister.

Holden ends up telling his story in an institution, and John Grady’s is open-ended because he rides off on his horse to places unknown.

I think if I had read these books farther apart I wouldn’t have noticed the similarities but since I read them back to back they were all very apparent to me,

Now I’m moving on to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

Have a good Sunday, everyone.