(~3 minutes to read)
For the last I don’t know how long, I’ve been working on a book about retirement planning on less than a seven-figure nest egg. A couple of people are reading the first draft, and I’ve just spent a week trying to come up with a title.
I think I’m there. But it needs some explanation. First, the title and the sub-title.
“The Javelin Catcher in the Bran”
“High-fibre Advice for Retirement Planning on a Hummingbird-sized Nest Egg”
The Explanation
J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” tells the story of a teenager who is fearful of adulthood and who desperately wants to cling to an idealized version of what is left of his childhood.
He envisages his role in life to be the “catcher in the rye”, a vision brought about by his mishearing the words of a Robert Burns poem. His vision involves a large field of rye, with thousands of children wandering through it, some of whom reach the other side where there is a sheer drop off a cliff; his job is to catch them before they fall.
(Book synopses don’t come much sketchier than that!)
Unlike “The Catcher in the Rye”, “The Javelin Catcher in the Bran” is not a first-person-narrated novel.
- It’s a humorous self-help book for people contemplating retirement with less than a seven-figure nest egg.
- It’s approximately eleven thousand words shorter than “The Catcher in the Rye”.
- Javelin catching is a pastime that is mentioned in the book. (And warned against!)
- Bran is a high fibre food. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that one of the stereotypical traits of older people is the need for lots of fibre in their diets.
The title “The Javelin Catcher in the Bran” is my (desperate?) attempt to (a) lead you to think that you’re reading a classic (or at least the illegitimate offspring of one), (b) establish the book as material that addresses the fears of people on the threshold of retirement and unprepared for it, and (c) indicate that this is a humorous book.
For “The Catcher in the Rye” fans, here is my explanation of how a person like Holden Caulfield might have described his vision of impending retirement[1].
Anyway, I keep picturing all these old guys playing games in this humungous open silo of bran and stuff. Thousands of old farts, all of them throwing javelins, and nobody’s around—nobody young and responsible, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of this crazy giant silo of bran. All the younger people are at the base of the silo, wondering what’s going on. What I have to do, I have to catch the javelins if they start to go over the edge of the silo. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the javelin catcher in the bran. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to do when I retire. I know it’s crazy.
That, dear reader, is how the title came about.
And for the record, that’s where the similarity ends.
[1] I don’t want the copyright police to prosecute me, so I’ve said, “a person like Holden Caulfield”.
Needless to say, I’ll be soliciting opinions on the title, but I’m not sure if reading the book is a pre-requisite to expressing an opinion or not.
If you do have an opinion on my choice of title and/or its rationale, please feel free to leave a comment.