“Catch-22” by Joseph L. Heller

Catch-22 was my favorite book as a teenager and my favorite book now.

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Catch 22 made me want to write-and read.

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Catch-22 was my favorite book when I was younger.

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This is the book I most want to read again for the first time. Didn’t want it to end, but it did. Second reading was fun, but it never had the frisson and excitement of first discovery.

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Changed my life. You know how you sometimes stare oddly at society’s incongruities like Yossarian, and it seems as if life keeps raising the number of missions? That’s me all the time.

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I was a miserable senior in high school when a girl handed me this, and around that time, Cat’s Cradle. For days on end, I did nothing in class but conceal my copy inside other books and read, fascinated by the outrageous freedom embodied in the book. In those books I saw for the first time an example of the sort of life I wanted (I mean that of the author, not the characters).

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A book that changed my life.

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The book I would most want to read again for the first time is Catch-22. The first time I read it was exhilarating.

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If something is horrible enough, the only way to survive it is to laugh. Catch-22 is the ultimate survival-by-laughing-through-the-horror novel. It resides proudly among the books I read as a kid that inspired me to become a novelist.

Source: Peroozal

This is one of the funniest books in the English language, written about the most depressing subject in the human experience—war. It had an enormous impact on me when I was young.

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I read Catch-22 for the first time while experiencing Plebe year at West Point, and I can’t tell you how many similarities I found between that book and that year. That doesn’t mean you have to have served in uniform to enjoy catch-22; after all, bureaucracy and madness can be found in every walk of life. With that said, however, the court-martial of Air Cadet Clevinger was one of the wittiest pieces of writing I’ve ever seen and, unfortunately, far too reminiscent of disciplinary hearings at West Point. If you haven’t read this, it’s well worth the time—hilarious, thought-provoking, and poignant all at once.

Source: Peroozal