Simon & Schuster Catch-22 50th Edition by Joseph Heller, Christopher Buckley - Paperback

If you are not familiar with the "Catch 22" you aint lived. A long, complex, difficult, funny and amazing book. I read it once a year (since many years ago) to reboot the ridiculous in my mind!

The madness of war and the foolishness of all that is human.Tragic and hilarious at the same time; a story that will have you laughing out loud at the ridiculous situations the books characters find themselves in.We've all used the phrase at some point, but it isn't until you read the book that you appreciate the gravity of the sentiment.A must read.

I really enjoyed the recent TV series so thought I'd read the source material. The books are always better than the film/TV series right? No.The amount of misogyny in this book is impressive given how few female characters there are.I've read plenty of books written in "different times" so I'm adept at blocking out a bit of misogyny so I can enjoy the rest of it but this really was something else, and on balance the rest of the book is not good enough to outweigh this.The sexual assaults added for entertainment and a rediculous chapter from a female point of view were just awful.Before you buy this, please search for chapter 27 "Nurse Duckett" online and read the first few paragraphs. It won't spoil the plot and will give you an idea of if this issue would stop you being able to read it.I won't read any of his work in the future and I'm grateful it was all removed for the series.

Catch-22 is perhaps the most bizarre novel I've read. It's tangential, disjointed funny and sad. It's very much tongue-in-cheek for the vast majority of the time, but when it it's not, it's poignant. From some of the most insane dialogue to scenes of personal horror, the book ties together the literal madness of war and the gritty truth of it.The idea of Catch-22 has become part of the general vernacular in most English speaking nations since the 1970s and most of us have used it to describe a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. The catch stems from the idea that as a combat pilot, you can only be grounded in perfect physical health if you're mad. If you ask to be grounded though, you must be sane because only mad men want to fly combat missions. Having asked to be grounded, how do you then prove you're mad? Do you go on parade naked? Do you attend a funeral sitting naked up a nearby tree? Do you have horrific nightmares at the thought of flying no more missions? You can try, but you won't succeed because of Catch-22.When you read this novel, you'll quickly discover that such a catch can only exist because everyone is mad. From Private to General, there is not a sane man to be found. Even the psychiatrist is quite plainly mad. The result is some real laugh out loud moments as we follow Yossarian through his struggles to be sent home alive. But when we read of the horrors through which he has lived, we begin to understand.There isn't too much dwelling on the facts of post-traumatic stress, and if you didn't know of such a thing, you would find it hard to spot in the novel - it is never discussed, never referred to and the resulting madness seems part of everyday life on base.I found I came to like Yossarian and think him the most sane of all, especially in comparison to the likes of Hungry Joe, Colonel Korn and General Scheisskopf (you don't need to know much German to see what Heller did there!).I found Catch-22 wasn't a novel I felt compelled to keep reading, largely because of its disjointed nature - it does hop around in time and space a lot - but when I did pick it up, I flew through it, often smiling to myself, often with an eyebrow raised. I smiled when I finished the book because ultimately I really enjoyed it. I now want to get my hands on the film and see just how true to the book it manages to stay.

I had a love and hate relationship with this book. I hate the concept of wars and that's why I loved the book, I hated the book because it's all about WWII, see? It's a catch 22!I just think the book is about 200 pages too long, it's a bit repetitive and the dialogs although very clever with some unforgettable lines it ended up being exhausting after around halfway through.You could only read any chapter on any order that it wouldn't matter, it just wasn't for me. There're so many random characters being thrown at you at random times, with no explanation that's overwhelming.