Knockout books lead to further questioning

TIM HORGAN told us to crack open the Catcher in the Rye.

A man well-known as a radio broadcaster with RTÉ Cork, a long-suffering Brian Dillons clubman and then an English teacher in St Finbarr’s Seminary, Farranferris — the famous hurling nursery perched on the city’s northside — he didn’t have to tell us again.

My classmates and I devoured the novel — admittedly when we fit it in around talking about a Harty Cup game on the horizon or a lost Simcox Cup tie in Feenagh. Written beautifully by the hermitic JD Salinger, who died this year, the book unfurls the story of a mixed-up New York teenager Holden Caulfield.