Speaking of Catch 22

Cidu Bill on Oct 30th 2009

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I personally found this funny because I never did finish that book.

Filed in Bill Bickel, Catch 22, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Zach Weiner, comic strips, comics, humor | 32 responses so far

32 Responses to “Speaking of Catch 22”

  1. Mark in Boston Oct 30th 2009 at 10:37 am 1

    Who said this about which extremely famous book? “None wished it longer.”

  2. Chennette Oct 30th 2009 at 10:44 am 2

    I also just started it, but at a friend’s house and never finished it before i left and then never got a copy myself…

  3. J-L Oct 30th 2009 at 11:15 am 3

    I checked “Catch-22″ out of the library once (as an adult) excited to read it, wishing a class had assigned it for us to read back in high school. (Why do high school English classes always assign the boring ones to read?)

    I read in the preface that shortly after publication, a critic criticized the book for its “boring and repetitive humor.” I remember thinking: Shows what that critic knows! He couldn’t recognize a book destined to be a classic if it were right in front of his face!

    I’m kind of ashamed to say that I eventually gave up on the book, because I found it… repetitive and boring.

    (My apologies if I’ve offended any “Catch-22″ fans.)

  4. mike Oct 30th 2009 at 02:12 pm 4

    I liked it and have read it multiple times. I agree though that high schools often seem to assign things to read that most won’t appreciate until they’re older — and they find the books so dull they NEVER TRY THEM AGAIN. way to promote reading!

  5. paperboy Oct 30th 2009 at 02:36 pm 5

    Hmmph! I never finish a higher class book, like “Finnegan’s Wake” or “Remembrance of Things Past”.

  6. Autumnal Harvest Oct 30th 2009 at 02:40 pm 6

    A lot of books that I thought were boring when I was in high school, I’ve reread as an adult and really liked, but I’m not sure that was the school’s fault. Some of it was the fact that I didn’t have the life experiences at the time to appreciate the book, but a lot of it was just due to the fact that being forced to do something makes it less enjoyable.

  7. Rebecca Oct 30th 2009 at 03:22 pm 7

    I have actually finished Catch-22. It never struck me as being that long, but it doesn’t really have a plot.

  8. Marshal Oct 30th 2009 at 03:23 pm 8

    An old TV show Room 222 had an episode dealing with a teacher (Karen
    Valentine) assigning Catch-22 against school board orders.

  9. Kate C Oct 30th 2009 at 04:45 pm 9

    On a similar note, who was the author (I’m thinking Dashiell Hammett) who gave the writing advice, “Be sure to take out the stuff nobody reads”?

  10. buzz Oct 30th 2009 at 07:42 pm 10

    I’ve read CATCH-22 at least three times. It’s a mosaic novel, meaning the story is presented in disjointed fashion ala Quentin Tarantino movies. It took me several chapters to start to figure out how everything was linking up, but by the time I was 3/4ths of the way through I not only saw how everything was going to flow together, but I was looking forward to how the still missing pieces were going to drop into place.

    Oh, and this summer I re-read MOBY DICK for the 4th time.

  11. turquoise cow Oct 30th 2009 at 07:43 pm 11

    I like what Mark Twain said about classics. Something about them being the books that everyone wants to say they’ve read but very few people have actually read.

  12. Ray Brady Oct 30th 2009 at 08:31 pm 12

    “Who said this about which extremely famous book? “None wished it longer.””

    Was that Sam Johnson about Paradise Lost?

  13. Mark in Boston Oct 30th 2009 at 11:10 pm 13

    Ray Brady is right! Johnson on Milton.

  14. CaroZ Oct 31st 2009 at 12:40 am 14

    I read Catch-22 in my mid-thirties. I could only read it in small doses, though I did finish it. Somehow until now I’d never heard it was a book most people didn’t finish!

    (Isn’t it a bit gruesome to be assigned as high school reading?)

  15. waferthinmint Oct 31st 2009 at 08:54 am 15

    loved catch 22 as does my 12 yr old daughter. she’s read it twice and I’ve read it at least 4 times. the book is not structured chronologically but rather based on an increasing number of missions. the books greatness lies in how it starts as a farce in the style of HGTTG but slides seamlessly into Kafka — imagine 3 stooges if halfway through the movie they started inflicting real damage but DONT STOP THE SCENE.

    for many readers this is not the hardest hurdle, the biggest difficulty for many readers is coming to grips with the idea that the narrator is not trustworthy. 3 person, omniscient narrators are always to be trusted, right? so when the story contradicts itself it leaves the reader truly unsure of what happened. in our literary cannon writers have traditionally used first person to tell BS. sometimes going to great lengths to do so: consider the marlow character in many of Joseph Conrad’s works; he exists solely to provide a narrator who is free to add interpretation to an otherwise 3rd person narrative.

    Caroz, HS reading doesn’t avoid gruesome but many schools avoid the book for its subversive and sexual content.

    Buzz, have you read Ken Kessey’s SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION? Kesey does with characters what Heller does with time. (BTW even Kesey wasn’t brave enough to buck the tradition of “use 1st person when you want narrative bias”. in Cuckoo’s Nest chief bromden narrates thru his psychosis — and that is hard enough for many readers!)

    class for extra credit name 2 other famous novels with mosaic stucture and 2 novels with untrustworthy narrators. bonus given for omniscient 3rd person lying bastard narrators.

  16. Lola Oct 31st 2009 at 09:48 am 16

    For some reason, when I read “omniscient 3rd person lying bastard narrators” the bible leapt in my face and now I can’t get it to move so I can search for others.

  17. waferthinmint Oct 31st 2009 at 10:12 am 17

    sorry, bible as fiction is a good try, but the narrators are each consistent within their own stories. it only becomes inconsistent when you treat that vast melange as a homogeneous piece. many sources, many ages, many writers, MANY editors.

    that’s why genesis tells the same story 2 different ways with, if i remember my childhood hebrew correctly, different gods. 1st line of the darn book and the main character is listed as masculine, plural. In its own way the bible (or at least the OT) is the Grimm’s Tales of its era.

    but that’s not what I’m here to tell you about. (I’m here to tell you about Alice. You remember Alice? This is a song about Alice…)

    I just felt like mentioning that Moby Dick is laugh out loud funny from the first page but most people just give up due to the dense transcendentalist inspired prose. (Damn You RWE!) And, of course, the jokes are dry. We americans don’t do well with subtle anymore.

    http://www.online-literature.com/melville/mobydick/

  18. Morris Keesan Oct 31st 2009 at 10:46 am 18

    This wasn’t at all funny to me. I read Catch-22 when I was in high school, on a friend’s recommendation, and I remember finding it very funny when I read it, and it didn’t seem at all long or difficult to finish.
    (I just checked my library’s catalogue, and the most common edition that libraries in the system have is 463 pages (1994, “with a new preface by the author”), which is a bit long for 1961 when it was first published, but not particularly noteworthy these days — the mystery novel that I just started reading this morning is 548 pages.

  19. waferthinmint Oct 31st 2009 at 11:04 am 19

    Many people say that about MobyD. I can’t tell you that you MUST find it funny. different strokes. (But you SHOULD!)

    in C22, if you don’t laugh in the first half of the book, there is something wrong with your sense of humor. If you are still laughing at the end of the book, there is something terribly wrong with your sense of humor.

  20. Mark in Boston Oct 31st 2009 at 01:10 pm 20

    Dicken’s “Old Curiosity Shop” starts out with a first person narrator but evidently in the second installment Dickens figured out “This ain’t gonna work” and abandons the narrator. Since it was published in installments, it was too late to change it. As originally published it was framed by “Master Humphrey’s Clock” and after Master Humphrey finishes reading the story to the group, he reveals that he was both the first-person narrator at the beginning and the “single gentleman” character that comes in toward the end, who was a relative of the main characters and knew them all along, even though as the narrator at the beginning he didn’t know any of them.

    Why is “David Copperfield” told in the first person (starting with David narrating events that happened before he was born)? I think it’s because in his previous book, Dickens killed off little Paul Dombey early on, after leading you to believe he would be the main character. If David Copperfield is the narrator, you can pretty much trust that he will live through most of the book.

    Now as for Moby Dick, you pretty much have to have a college education today (the equivalent of an eighth-grade education back then, speaking Latin fluently, reading a little Greek and having read most of the Bible in translation and parts of it in the original languages) to get the jokes. Moby Dick has the most erudite fart joke ever, and it’s a throwaway line — search for “Pythagorean maxim”.

  21. waferthinmint Oct 31st 2009 at 01:47 pm 21

    Mark in Boston (Or Mark in Cambridge?), I agree that MDick is improved by a little education, but in the whole I think the wit shines through well enough if you just have the patience to think about what he is saying. that is the essence of dry wit.

    I don’t agree that one must be quite as educated as you make out. i enjoyed it when I read it at 18 and I enjoyed it more when I read it last year at 42. my daughter finds it hard going and has not had time to read more than a hundred pages, and she has a lot of questions BUT she’s in 7th grade and she laughs (well, chuckles) at it pretty often. Of course the symbolism goes rocketing past her but who among us can’t claim that failing from time to time?

    I think you Dickens points a re a clear indication that I failed to be clear in my earlier point about Narration. I didn’t mean to say that ALL 1st Person Narrators (1PN) are liars. I meant that our English cannon tends to employ a 1PN when a narrator must lie/slant the truth/spin. and that as readers we have been taught to trust 3PNs, hence the shock caused by C22’s narrator’s sharing of Yossarian’s delusional world views.

    I hate typing but hot damn i’m enjoying this thread.

  22. Chuck Oct 31st 2009 at 03:39 pm 22

    So.

    All the literature talk made me read Ray Brady as Ray Bradbury.

  23. buzz Oct 31st 2009 at 04:26 pm 23

    waferthinmint: Yeah, big fan of SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION (book & movie; I’m one of the very few people who enjoyed the film, it appears). Also liked CUCKOO’S NEST; I think SOMETIMES is the better story but CUCKOO has the more memorable characters.

  24. aprilp_katje Nov 1st 2009 at 10:04 am 24

    Aw, I love Catch-22. I’ve read it twice and will probably read it at least two more times. The book never seemed especially long to me.

  25. Dave in Boston Nov 1st 2009 at 08:23 pm 25

    Catch-22 was ok. Moby Dick is vastly overrated. (For all it’s supposed to be this gripping picture of a man obsessed, there’s scarcely any development of that, and what there is becomes hopelessly diluted by the great wads of filler material.)

    Mark Twain, on the other hand, was actually a good writer.

  26. Frank the curmudgeon Nov 2nd 2009 at 12:42 am 26

    It took me over 30 years to finish WAR AND PEACE.

  27. waferthinmint Nov 2nd 2009 at 12:54 am 27

    David in Boston: your comment reminded of the New Englander trying a banana for the first time.

    “how did you like it?” “well, after you pare and core it there isn’t overmuch left to enjoy.”

    Moby Dick is about the filler. Ahab is just part of the filler. this is intentional on HM’s part.

  28. Dave in Boston Nov 2nd 2009 at 02:57 am 28

    That’s as may be (without getting into an argument over authorial intent) but ultimately filler is… filler, and I’d rather read 450 pages of novel.

    I’m aware essentially all 18th-century novels are padded out with filler, but some writers did a better job of integrating the whole thing together than others.

  29. mkilby Nov 2nd 2009 at 10:34 am 29

    If you’re looking for some famous “literature” that is vastly overrated, try “20000 Leagues Under the Sea”. I made it through, but was very disappointed by the ending, and the whole point of the book is to have an opportunity to present incredible descriptions and impossible scenery. It’s similar to the “eye candy” that Rowling uses so often in Harry Potter: myriad adjectives and objects that have nothing to do with the plot, but are fun to describe. Unfortunately, they are not always fun to plow through as a reader.

  30. Hibbs Nov 2nd 2009 at 04:42 pm 30

    I always list C22 as one of my favorites whenever such lists are brought up. When I first read it in college, I thought it was terribly funny. When I reread it twenty years later, I found it terribly sad. In any case, I think it makes more sense or is at least more interesting if you first read “Crime and Punishment”.

  31. Duncan Nov 2nd 2009 at 09:32 pm 31

    “If you’re looking for some famous “literature” that is vastly overrated, try “20000 Leagues Under the Sea”.” - I find Nemo fairly compelling.

    Seriously though, Catch-22 is an easily read comic book of only around 500 pages or so. If you can’t finish it, frankly, you’re just not trying.

    @Hibbs - At different times in your life you find different parts compelling. My first time through I was all about Orr (’Appleby has flies in his eyes!’), next time Natley’s perennial struggle with his whore seemed strangely profound to me. Last time I read it I remember being more impressed by the satire of capitalism in the form of Milo than I’d been before. A book for all seasons, never dull.

  32. mkilby Nov 3rd 2009 at 03:24 am 32

    @Duncan - Nemo has become a compelling character largely through the various film versions. I must admit that I did not read the “original” book (in French), so I can’t judge the quality of the English translation. Nevertheless, all too often screenwriters mutilate books in order to condense the material for the film version, but I think this is one case where the screenwriters had a good opportunity to make some improvements to the tale.

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