The authors who show up most often on Obama’s summer reading lists’

The 44th president’s new reading list is out, and it features some familiar names.

By Ela Jalil

On July 16, “The Catcher in the Rye,” by J.D. Salinger, will turn 75. Commemorating such a nice big number would surely strike its adolescent hero, Holden Caulfield, as the absolute nadir of “corny,” but maybe we could use a little corn, as the data centers invade our farmland.

Pour out a Scotch and soda — make that a malted milk — for this spry codger of a novel that’s stayed on the dance floor long past when might be expected, leaping over book bans from the right and dodging cancellation from the left. “Catcher” has somehow inspired artists as disparate as John Guare and Guns N’ Roses, its denunciation of phoniness presaging the social-media demand for “authenticity.”

Though set mostly in the sophisticated precincts of New York City where Salinger was raised but did not remain, “Catcher” might be the purest of the Great American Novels. (Partly because it has never been made into a movie, though everyone from Billy Wilder to Steven Spielberg tried to secure the rights.) Read the full story at the New York Times.