Franny and Zooey vs The Idiot: Which Should You Read?
Both live on shelves: Women college students, College students, Fiction
Franny and Zooey
“It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so – I don't know – not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and – sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.”
Meet Franny and her younger brother, Zooey, in two Salinger stories.
vs
The Idiot
Embarking on her freshman year at Harvard in the early tech days of the 1990s, a young artist and daughter of Turkish immigrants begins a correspondence with an older mathematics student from Hungary while struggling…
The verdict
- Readers rate Franny and Zooey highest: Franny and Zooey 4.0 · The Idiot 3.6.
- Franny and Zooey is the quickest read — about 3 hours vs 7 for The Idiot.
- Franny and Zooey has the widest readership — 245700 ratings behind its score.
How to choose
Scores by source
| Franny and Zooey | The Idiot | |
|---|---|---|
| Goodreads | 4.0 (245700) | 3.6 (114150) |
| Hardcover | 3.9 (340) | 3.7 (188) |
| Google Books | — | 5.0 (1) |
| Apple Books | 4.0 (149) | 4.0 (382) |
Reception
| Franny and Zooey | The Idiot | |
|---|---|---|
| Ratings | 245700 | 114150 |
| Editions | 65 | 15 |
| Film adaptations | 1 | 1 |
| Want to read | 192931 | 268745 |
| Reading it now | 6375 | 13037 |
| Written reviews | 14581 | 20209 |
| Wikipedia attention | 7005 | 3632 |
| Pages | 202 | 419 |