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Loading... Catch-22 (1961)by Joseph Heller
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» 127 more Favourite Books (39) Best Satire (4) BBC Big Read (68) Folio Society (40) 1960s (3) Top Five Books of 2013 (210) War Literature (5) BBC Big Read (26) Five star books (125) A Novel Cure (94) Best War Stories (15) BBC Radio 4 Bookclub (27) 1,001 BYMRBYD Concensus (145) Books Read in 2021 (473) Books Set on Islands (12) Books Read in 2016 (1,478) Page Turners (49) Books Read in 2009 (22) Overdue Podcast (112) 100 World Classics (52) Read This Next (18) First Novels (34) Read (70) Books Read in 2020 (3,479) Modernism (73) The Greatest Books (62) Reiny (4) 2017 Goal (7) Bureaucracies (3) Fiction For Men (46) Best First Lines (103) Funny Books (10) Política - Clásicos (161) Jim's Bookshelf (6) Plan to Read Books (26) My Favourite Books (46) AP Lit (233) 100 (54) Antiheroes (4) Read (9) Classics (2) World War II Novels (10) Biggest Disappointments (469) Historical Fiction (862) I Can't Finish This Book (163) Unread books (689) Best Young Adult (424) Favorite Long Books (325) No current Talk conversations about this book. Picked this one up and set it down over and over again. It's hard to get into, then alternates between hilarious and monotonous. Probably just me, and if you try it, be sure to give it an honest try as it does get better, with lots to chew on. It's tough to say anything new about a book this widely read, so I won't even try. 2.5 I've been struggling with depression lately. The dopamine dump I received from finishing this book was really something. Catch 22 is absurdist and non-linear to the point of willing convolution; it features an excess of characters, many of which are superfluous. I can understand what people like about it, but to me it's just a very weighty volume of the same point and the same jokes over and over again, too much of which is loosely connected in a way that's as uninteresting as it isn't clever. The writing is a kind of weird hybrid of Kafka and Vonnegut. I like and appreciate the latter; I dislike, but appreciate the former. Oddly, I don't think I really care for Catch 22 on many levels at all. Catch-22 went from funny, entertaining to just a overlong criticism of obeying authority. Yawn. It's like it had a cool idea about the world, cornered me at a party and then talked my ear off for the next six days. A 'classic' it may be but for me the inanities were too much. A tiresome read
"A wild, moving, shocking, hilarious, raging, exhilarating, giant roller-coaster of a book" "the best novel to come out in years" "doesn't even seem to be written; instead, it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper.... what remains is a debris of sour jokes" "Catch-22," by Joseph Heller, is not an entirely successful novel. It is not even a good novel by conventional standards. But there can be no doubt that it is the strangest novel yet written about the United States Air Force in World War II. Wildly original, brilliantly comic, brutally gruesome, it is a dazzling performance that will probably outrage nearly as many readers as it delights. In any case, it is one of the most startling first novels of the year and it may make its author famous. A portrait gallery, a collection of anecdotes, some of them wonderful, a parade of scenes, some of them finely assembled, a series of descriptions, yes, but the book is no novel... Its author, Joseph Heller, is like a brilliant painter who decides to throw all the ideas in his sketchbooks onto one canvas, relying on their charm and shock to compensate for the lack of design. Belongs to SeriesCatch-22 (1) Belongs to Publisher SeriesHas the adaptationHas as a studyHas as a commentary on the textHas as a student's study guideHas as a teacher's guideAwardsDistinctionsNotable ListsGreatest Books algorithm (#23) Hungarian Big Read (44) Torchlight List (35.1) Waterstones Books of the Century (No 5 – 1997) Голямото четене (18)
Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, Catch-22 is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never even met keep trying to kill him. No library descriptions found. |
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![]() GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:![]()
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Reading this book now in 2023 when the world has changed so much is interesting - how badly women were treated for instance - most women in this book were willing prostitutes, or simply willing. War hasn't changed much. And Catch-22 just means rules are made by those who have the power to do so to do whatever they can get away with. Definitely no change there! (