Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

I bought a paperback copy of this book once, several years ago, and read the first few pages I think. Then I set it down and never came back to it and the book was sitting in the bottom of a box somewhere in a basement and it got water-damaged so I had to throw it away.

But I checked it out and read it finally this summer. I don't know what prompted me to pursue it on my visit to the library, but for some reason I did and I'm glad. It was twisted. I described it to a friend of mine as a cross between Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut and V. by Thomas Pynchon. He had read all three, so he knew what I was talking about. An ironic war comedy like Slaughterhouse-5 but incredibly complex and sinister like V. I loved the former, but wasn't all that impressed by the latter.

I was watching "Jeopardy!" sometime in early September on a break from reading. I usually read three or four books at a time, so I had a short stack of books sitting next to me on the coffee table as I watched tv. The category was Characters in Search of an Author, or something like that, in which Alex Trebek would read the name of a Character as the clue and the contestant's response would have to be a question of the name of the author. Such as "Pudd'nhead Wilson," followed by "Who is Mark Twain?" I haven't read Pudd'nhead Wilson, by the way.

But one of the characters was Bilbo Baggins, and I happened to have a copy of The Hobbit sitting right there next to me. J.R.R. Tolkien. I held it up in amusement for my wife, who was watching the show with me. It was a funny coincidence. But then later in the category the character was John Yossarian. Again, I reached next to me and held up Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. Incredible double coincidence. The missus and I were cracking up. I guess you had to be there.

There are books like Catch-22 which have entered into the cultural vocabulary. People use the title to mean any paradox, even though it's not as simple as that. I decided to read it so I would know what I was talking about when I use the phrase. The following passages, in essence, describe what Catch-22 actually is.

It's not a simple weighing of options, as most people take it to mean. If I have a thousand dollars and I can use it to buy either a thousand dollars' worth of compact discs or a thousand dollars' worth of stereo equipment, but not both, then that would be complicated, but not really a Catch-22. I think a lot of people would describe that as a Catch-22, erroneously.

On the other hand, if I'm a fresh college graduate (which I am) and can't get a job because I don't have experience but I can't get experience if I don't have a job, then that would be closer to the true meaning of Catch-22. The way I interpret it, at least. Or perhaps that episode of "Cheers" where they buy a VCR for the bar and it comes with a videotape of installation instructions. How do you watch the tape to install the VCR if you don't have the VCR installed yet? What you need to do is install the VCR so you can watch the tape, but then if you're watching the tape it means you've successfully installed the tape and therefore don't need to watch it. And on and on.

Examples abound. It would take me all day to cover them all, so I won't.

I read the last 120 pages of this book in the last two days of September. I didn't want to draw it out into October, since I started it in August. I hate it when it takes me so long to read a book. I started a new full-time job in September, so my reading time has been dramatically reduced. And I'm usually too exhausted from working all day to read without falling asleep. That's a shame, but the bills need to be paid more than the books need to be read.