You pick up a book that you have heard from somewhere at some point that it is very good, that it is controversial, that a large portion of readers consider it a masterpiece, but you are not prepared for this bomb of spiritual humor, raw satire, unique portrayal of madness, absurdity, and horror. You start it slowly and there is a smile here, a nervous laugh there, because it has humor, you can't deny it, it makes you laugh, but you know that something is not right because at the same time you also want to cry. A lump rises in your throat as you move forward and it squeezes more and more and you continue to laugh but at the same time you want more and more to run away somewhere to cry with sobs because yes, it is surreal, it is absurd, it is witty, but it is also so real.

The story is somewhat loose. In a squadron of the American air force on the island of Pianosa in Italy in 1944, we follow the story of the American soldiers and mainly of Yossarian, the bombardier who is convinced that everyone is trying to kill him and he is fighting to save his life. Around him, ambitious officers risk the lives of their subordinates aimlessly, the black market flourishes, the absurdity of military logic and war prevails, the idealism of a few is brutally crushed.

Heller describes the lives and deaths of some of the members of the squadron, their fears and concerns, their thoughts and feelings based on his own experience from World War II and in such a direct and profound way that the reader surely sees some of his own thoughts in the mirror (even if he has never seen war). He manages to convey in a comical way but also with respect the most tragic scenes and to strip the reader's feelings in this way without forcing them.

Catch-22 is surely a masterpiece. Satirical, angry, sensitive, witty, tragic. It has everything and at the same time it is so bound and so coherent that you don't get bored for a second. Yesterday I read 300 pages (half of it) and I wish I had left a little more for today. But I will read it again, for sure. It is one of the few books that I say this with certainty and I will read it again.

PS: I'm sure the screenwriter of the 4th season of Blackadder had read this book.

In the story, there was an educated Texan who seemed to stand out like someone in Technicolor. He patriotically believed that people of means, the so-called decent folk, should have more votes than those he considered as drifters, whores, criminals, degenerates, atheists, and indecent folk, essentially people without means. However, despite initially coming across as good-natured, generous, and likable, in just three days, no one could tolerate him anymore.

The people one serves with in the military are not all that different from those in other workplaces. There are the over-achievers and the slackers, the creative thinkers and the conformists, the control freaks and the contrarians. At the core, the folks in the USN and USMC are virtually indistinguishable from those at IBM and AT&T. The key difference lies in the distribution of ineptitude. Unlike in most civilian workplaces, incompetent individuals in the military cannot be easily terminated, and the competent ones, when faced with arduous ineptitude, cannot simply quit and walk away.

The Peter Principal, as theorized by Laurence J. Peter in 1969, states that a competent person will be promoted until they reach a level where they are no longer competent and will then remain there. Thus, complete equilibrium is reached when all parties are promoted to their uniquely individual levels of incompetence, which brings us to Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

The quote "You see? You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!" showcases Heller's genius. He elevates sophistry to an elegant art form. I don't think I've ever come across a novel that better illustrates the frustrating and degrading aspects of military service. Although it's exaggerated, circular, and often repetitive, that's all part of Heller's panorama-of-paradox and symphony-of-satire. This is complex brilliance presented in simple paper and ink.

Hands down, this is the funniest book I've ever read. Some of Heller's sentences are so witty and hilarious that I couldn't help but laugh out loud. I often had to set the book down after trying to continue reading, just to laugh some more and fully appreciate all the wit. However, the style of humor does get old after a while. It starts to feel like reading Seinfeld screenplays for hours on end.

The crazy ironic predicaments that Yosarian, the focal character, finds himself in are pure genius. And some of the subplots in this novel are better than classics in their own right. But, even with that in mind, Catch-22 is incredibly complex. The chapters can sometimes feel like puzzle pieces that don't connect to anything else. The beginning, although highly entertaining, is particularly convoluted. For the first ten chapters or so, it seems like there's just one character introduction after another, and it feels like there's no plot until about 30% of the way through the book.

Partly because of that, the story loses some of its impact. But more importantly, it's so damn funny that it's hard to take it seriously. Even though the characters will stay in your mind forever, it's difficult to truly care about them because they're such exaggerated characters that they almost feel unreal.

Am I saying this isn't a masterpiece? No. It's more confusing than a riddle at times, and I'm sure I missed some important things. But even still, there are only maybe two other books that I'd rather have read than this.

This is one of those books that people have very polarized opinions about. Some think it is simply brilliant, while others find it just plain annoying. As can be seen from the rating, I firmly fall into the latter category. Perhaps I just lack the ability to truly appreciate the genius of Heller's prose. However, I much prefer a story that focuses on character development and a coherent plot rather than a series of rambling and confusing anecdotes that seem to lead nowhere.

It's important to note that war is indeed a paradox, and we all understand that concept. But in this book, it feels like that point is being overly emphasized at the expense of other aspects that would make for a more engaging read.

I read this for my 12th grade AP English class, hoping to gain some new insights and perspectives. Unfortunately, it didn't quite meet my expectations in that regard. While I can recognize that there may be some merit to Heller's writing style, it just didn't resonate with me on a personal level.

Overall, I would say that this book is not for everyone. If you're someone who enjoys a more straightforward and plot-driven narrative, you may find this book frustrating. However, if you're willing to wade through the chaos and try to uncover the deeper meanings hidden within, you may discover something truly remarkable.

It was a slow read.

I wanted to put the books aside many times, but finally, I finished it.

And I discovered its power on the unconscious level: for two nights, I was tortured by dreams about war.

On the surface, the book appears to be a jumble of comical, satirical, and cynical moments, scattered in time and space.

However, upon deeper reflection, all the comical elements turn tragic because we are discussing World War II and the human life that is so pointlessly wasted.

Nobody desires to fight, yet everyone does so for freedom, for the world, and for America - all the grand words that those in power like to use to justify any of their actions.

Most of the heroes in the book die in the same strange way they lived, and you don't notice the cruelty of their deaths until you realize that it is death we are talking about.

The main hero is the only one who begins to fight against the system, and only in the end do we see Heller's hope for an escape from this bloody and unfair mess.

Overall, the book is a thought-provoking exploration of war, human nature, and the power of the system.

This is the best book I've ever read.

It has truly been a remarkable companion throughout my life.

I first encountered it during my senior year of high school in AP Lit. We studied it along with Kafka's The Metamorphosis, and those discussions were incredibly engaging, delving into the mysteries not only within the books but also in life itself. It all led to a detailed "compare and contrast" essay that deepened my understanding.

The following year, as a college freshman, I read it again simply for the joy of it.

My junior year, I took it a step further and recited a section as a dramatic reading in my Oral Comm class.

Shortly before graduating and again after getting my first job as an English teacher, I revisited this book. I even purchased a copy for my classroom library, hoping that some precocious student might discover its wonders on their own.

After moving to a new state, I read it twice more, once cover to cover and once in semi-random excerpts, starting from wherever my thumb landed.

In 2016, I read it as my 52nd book, completing my Goodreads Reading Challenge. Even more than 60 years after its publication, it has not lost an ounce of its charm, poignancy, or power.

It has truly shaped my worldview. I adore the wordplay, the perfect skewering and mocking of bureaucracy, and how logical thinking can lead to illogical ends. It makes me stop, think, and appreciate. It reminds me of the fleeting nature of life and the value of truly living. It encourages me to question everything: authority, bureaucracy, faith, government, society.

I love the ending, where Yossarian makes the masterful decision to stop being a pawn and become a king, or rather, to leave the game and its arbitrary rules altogether.

I love this book with all my heart.

So, I will most definitely read it again, and this review will continue to grow, and I will always affirm:

This is the best book I have ever read.

It keeps me out of trouble.

A shiny new batch of awesome has landed on my "all time favorite" shelf. It's been quite a while since I've so thoroughly enjoyed reading a novel that simultaneously left me intellectually awestruck, much like Joseph Heller's classic sermon on the insanity of war. What a sublime, literary feast!

To prepare this masterpiece, Heller starts with a surrealistic, Kafkaesque worldview basted in chaos. He then kneads in a plot reminiscent of Pynchon, ensuring that the bizarre, placidly disjointed surface fully camouflages the powerfully nuanced and deceptively focused central message. The whole thing is marinated in a dark, hilarious satire that would have made Vonnegut beam like a proud papa. Finally, it's baked at 350, seasoned with zesty prose, and served.

Voila...a singular, absurdilarious serving of inspired genius that I cannot recommend more highly. This novel was far more than I expected. Despite its pervasive, laugh-out-loud humor, Heller's story is the most horrifyingly effective depiction of the insanity of war that I've ever read. His insight shows us the illogic, out-of-control nihilism, and chaotic, existential absurdity of war.

The plot follows the exploits of the fictional 256th fighter squadron during WWII. Our chief tour guide is Captain John Yossarian, whose main ambition is to "live forever or die in the attempt." Yossarian's antics to stay alive are both ingenious and hysterical. Despite his less than moral shenanigans, he acts as the conscience of the story, railing against the war and the bureaucracy that perpetrates it.

The writing is brilliant, the characters are unique and memorable, and the story will leave you scarred with wonder and awe. I can't believe I hesitated to read this, and I plan to revisit it many times in the future. For those who have experienced this before or just want a stroll down memory lane, here are a few pearls that showcase this novel's absurd, satirical win.

Finally, I wanted to share the contents of a letter sent by the base commander. It's a masterful joke that's set up about 200 pages before. 6.0 stars. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!

  

A novel is set during World War II on an American airbase in Southern Italy, near Rome. However, this setting is entirely incidental. The book is written in the spirit of The Iliad. It presents the idea that life is war, and the nature of war is absurd. Yet, we engage in it anyway, and in fact, we must. War must be absurd because we are absurd beings. If it weren't so, we wouldn't fight each other. One might detect a hint of 1984, but this time with a smile. 'War is peace' and 'peace is war'. The war is in the background. It is both the most important thing and the most irrelevant. The web of black marketing, on the other hand, has meaning and consequence. But what is wheeling and dealing, profit and loss if not war by another name? It is another front of human mobilisation and struggle. Is the Major really major? We all will die. Why worry if death comes from below while sitting in an absurd flying contraption, rather than after twenty or thirty years in the advertising business trying to persuade housewives to change their preferred brand of cigarettes or to get overly excited about soap powder. Only Heller knew.

My relationship with this book was rather quixotic.

The initial few chapters managed to bring a smile to my face, albeit a bitter, ironic, and life-wise sort of smile. I adored the cleverness and the deceptive punch-you-in-the-side manner in which Heller made his points, all wrapped up in the whirling, hilariously awful world he created while depicting a tired, worn-out unit towards the end of WWII in Italy.

The choice of the bombardier Yossarian as the main character was perfect. He had witnessed one too many horrors, and his questioning, somewhat questionable state of mind was ideal for depicting all the contradictions, paradoxes, hidden and buried ideas that no one wants to discuss during a war, as well as the sheer absurdism of the soldiers' lives, even in our so-called "good war" of the 20th century.

One can understand Heller's rage at the blind torpor of a society that prefers to be led and blame others for what occurs. This particular unit is under special strain as their commander orders them to fly more combat missions than any other unit and continuously raises the number each time his men see a glimmer of their time to go home. The endless, senseless, everyday cruelty inflicted on both their surroundings and each other slowly grinds the unit's minds and bodies into dust.

I almost wonder if, when this was published, Heller was afraid that his audience would be inclined to put this book down as quickly as possible. It was one of my concerns with the book that he seemed to present all his major questions, issues, wild emotions, and ultimate points within the first few chapters. As a result, for a while afterwards, it did seem rather monotonously repetitive, as we saw more and more ways of saying exactly the same thing in a nearly identical formula.

Perhaps absurdism is more effective in short form, as there was a period in the book where I was rolling my eyes and seeing shades of Catcher in the Rye's blind "Fuck the man!" screaming, enough to make me grudgingly read on. I understand that it may have been part of his point to illustrate that the absurdism of war goes on and on and on, but it did become a bit of a chore to read in the middle. Deceptively light comedy can't continue like that without at least some hints of deeper pathos that we don't have to assume is there.

Also, the attitude that Heller is espousing and the earnest questions he asks do feel somewhat dated. Not their message, of course, which is universal. Questioning authority, the value of life, the cost of war, the meaning of country and honor and duty, etc. But there is a phrasing that firmly places it in its time, which does set you apart from it a bit. I also found the overall tone to be somewhat bleak and cold, and not in a way that I wanted to spend time with at all. This middle section is the reason it took me so long to finish this book.

However, after I passed the halfway mark, my opinion improved once again. The character drawing, while still absurd enough to bring a wry smile to my face, was poignant enough that I started to get more involved. I needed to see the layers, the inner roiling turmoil, the thoughts of these desperate men as they went about their tragically ridiculous lives, and understand what made them survive or finally give up.

It also helped that we saw more of Yossarian, making him a fully fledged person rather than just a conduit for the major points of the book. Perhaps I'm not expressing this correctly, but while I can critically analyze a character presented as a symbol, I can't be truly drawn to reading more about them unless there is more to see. In any case, I thought the last half, intermittently, and particularly the last hundred and fifty pages or so, were absolutely heartbreaking. In the end, Heller does make you both grieve and rejoice, and the story fulfills the promise of what I had hoped it would be after its manically brilliant introduction.

All in all, it is a novel that is absolutely worthy of its "classic" name. It is worth reading to remind you of the many different perspectives available on an issue and to think critically about even concepts that you've never had to question before. Nothing is given, and it is always worthwhile to be reminded of that.

After reading one of the most famous writings of the 20th century, there is once again a complete sense of disappointment for me!

The story "Catch-22" is about a person who is responsible for setting the bomb angle and the time of dropping it in an airplane, so he has a very important responsibility. The main character of the story is Yossarian. At first, he has to fly 25 missions in order to be able to return home. But with the change of the operation commander, the number of completed missions keeps rising higher and higher. The rest of the story follows Yossarian's attempts to escape from the war and also the gradual weakening of the army's morale with the observation of the deaths of the American forces.

As you can see, the story has many similarities with the movie "Lolita" and I myself prefer "Lolita"! The book is not very engaging and the writer's bitter satire was not interesting for me either. By the way, there is also a TV series with the same name starring George Clooney, and the TV series is also not as good and poetic as the book.

I certainly don't like all classics!

There are numerous different kinds of humor. It was precisely this book's particular brand of humor that spoiled the book for me. The humor is satirical, and generally speaking, I have an affinity for satirical humor. However, this author's satire didn't quite hit the mark for me. At the beginning, the humor was somewhat manageable, but then it crossed the line and went too far. It became overly exaggerated! First, it simply veered into the realm of the absurd, but by the end of the book, it had devolved into the truly ridiculous. This over-the-top humor detracted from the book's intended message.

I vividly remember when the book was first published. It is undoubtedly a product of the 60s. I wholeheartedly agree with the message it conveys. The book serves as a scathing criticism of the military, war, and its insidious encroachment into the market. The message is of great significance.

Nevertheless, the way the author portrays women definitely did not enhance my enjoyment of the book.

On a positive note, the audiobook narration by Trevor White was actually rather excellent, despite the fact that he dramatized the reading to some extent.

Early in my adulthood, I came to realize a rather strange and frustrating truth. To be considered crazy and be granted asylum from my superiors in an institution for the insane, I first had to be proven crazy enough to be excused from the harsh treatment of my Alpha Male immediate superior. It was a classic Catch-22 situation.

In my twenties, I had a huge problem with Yossarian, because in a sense, he was me. I lived with the concept of Catch-22 not only in my mind but also in my private life. For years, whenever I picked up that battered paperback from my shelf, I would initially laugh. But then, those chuckles would turn into something more, choking me up.

Why did it make me angry? There had to be a plausible and logical explanation buried deep within my heavily medicated memory. And indeed, there was. However, that explanation was so implausibly logical that it could only be another Catch-22. It was a desperately choking Catch-22, one that could bury you alive, not just in a mountain of endless forms filled out in block letters and in triplicate.

No, this was a Catch-22 that could suffocate you. It happened to me fifty-one years ago. When I voluntarily admitted myself to the hospital, I must have unknowingly signed the doctors' own Catch-22. It went something like this: 'I'm crazy to let myself enter this hell-hole, but if I should become sane later on and try to get myself released, I can't,' because I couldn't be sane if I fled from the predators' harsh treatment into a nut house.

"Haha. So there - Catch-22. You're stuck with us, Fergus." And yes, of course, they took turns gently administering my stiff treatments while I was there. I think it was the ferociously cool dude von Clausewitz who once infamously told us that the modern world is run on a militaristic model: as an iron fist in a velvet glove. The Ministry of Peace.

Well, that velvet glove dupes us into believing that everything is okay when in reality, we're being used. And our choking chuckles prove that we're insane. Since I was thus proved insane, it was yet another Catch-22. So how could I be sane? Especially with my doctors' immediate use of heavy neuroleptics that temporarily made me the opposite. Sounds crazy? Then I was legally crazy. BBB. BS Baffles Brains. Bingo!

Happy Catch-22, Fergus. Never mind that I was hounded into that place by sexual predators. I was sane, so therefore I must be crazy. Catch-22, Fergus. You were crazy to come here. Haha. If you wake up, that's, well... forbidden. But we have some supplements to ensure you never do. If by some chance you do wake up, no one really cares. You're cornered. Catch-22.

How do you think the incredible author, Joseph Heller, saw all this so clearly? Because he couldn't be a war hero and a peace protestor at the same time. Catch-22, my friends. Pleased to meet you, Herr von Clausewitz, old bud. But then... Heller wrote it all down, so that the blind might have eyes to see. Catch-22: Tag and You're IT. Read it! And you'll see, for a change. As I did after all my hard knocks. And the only option then is the grace that makes everything okay.