Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)

[ie]

nonfiction and another friend of mine have not read this novel.




I haven't read it in at least four years, but [C-]man, it is a great novel. It's just so strange and funny and has little enlightening bits here and there that really make it worthwhile. I think it's a significant novel to read.

And, I thought the movie butchered up the novel. That thought aside...


How many of yous have read Catch-22?

[PTAhole]

I have a copy of it. I plan on reading it pretty soon. I love the movie, though, so we may have a bit of an argument over that one. Hah.

[captainofbeef]

I read it and I have to say that I struggle to see the greatness of it. It was a decent book, but I just didn't find it was the classic that everyone says it is.

[ie]

Well, I read most of the book over the period of four very long days. I needed to read it for a class, so I tried to piledrive my way through it, but it's just so dense that it was really an unenjoyable couple of days.

I read it back when I was in high school, so I can't really argue for it too much. While I can't say it's one of the best novels ever written, I can say it's important that people at least read it once at some point. The concept of Catch-22 can be applied to quite a few things, and even if you don't identify everything possible as a Catch-22, the concept appears more often than you'd think. Besides the popularity of that concept, well, I think it's a fun novel full of weird characters and these little thoughts.

Like this one scene, where Yossarian is really tired, so he goes to sleep. He closes his eyes and then he opens them again and it's morning. It doesn't relate to the plot much at all, it's just an observation the author made once and then injected it into a novel. But that kind of stuff actually does happen - eight, ten hours can go by just in the blink of an eye. And depending on how much you want to go into it, it could either be a neat observation, or a quick commentary on how fast our lives can go by if we let them.


Yah.
Well, like I said, the novel was too dense. So, I can understand that they had to shorten it up.

I saw the movie a few months after finishing the novel, and I must admit, I could barely recognize the story in the movie. It just left me feeling very disappointed with it, but this was before I started watching movies regularly, so I just kept that impression of the movie: flat out disappointment.

I've been meaning to re-read the novel again. Perhaps I should check out the movie again too.

[captainofbeef]

I just picked this one up from my closet collection, I think I'm going to try to re-read it soon.

[captainofbeef]

And I still don't see why Catch-22 is so classic after yet another re-read. Maybe its just not for me.