Imagine assassination. It's easy if you read...

It's amazing people read "The Catcher in the Rye" and the message they took from it was assassinate John Lennon or Ronald Reagan.

Personally I found the book so boring I literally couldn't tell you what happened in it.  Apart from some teenager wandering about aimlessly being a bit of a wanker ... which is sort of what they do anyway so not really much of a plot.

It's one of many books I read in my 20s and 30s in an attempt to improve myself as an artist.  The problem is I haven't improved and I can't remember whole chunks of it.  Which is odd because I can remember vividly some parts of some books.  And I can remember whole films and TV series from childhood.  But this book has faded away.  I guess I never really understood it.  I also think it didn't contain a single joke.  Even that book William Golding wrote about a man shipwrecked on a rock trying to survive on limpits has more depth.

Anyway, it just came to mind as I saw a video online of Lennon larking about and signing autographs in Central Park and I remembered walking past his memorial and googled his assassination.  His murderer even used hollow point bullets to make sure his internal organs would not be repairable.  For such bullets may not be legal in war following the Saint Petersburg Declaration of 1868 but civilians can still buy them. That's hatred and capitalism.  So much hatred from such a little boring book.

I had to wonder if J D Salinger had said anything about the murder... But he famously went into a giant sulk like Holden Cauliflower.  Evil comes in many forms...