Catch-22: book & film

I've had a long and tumultuous relationship with the novel Catch-22. As an undergrad, I was an English major, and it seemed to me that every male professor I ever had assigned Catch-22. The first time I read it, I felt pretty lukewarm about it. I enjoyed the humor and the structure, but I just hate war novels. Any war novels. There are even books I claim to love whose war chapters I skipped. Even if an author (like Joseph Heller) agrees strongly with me that war is the stupidest, most absurd and insane thing human beings do, I probably don't want to read his novel. I say his because women rarely write war novels.

By the third time the novel was assigned, I didn't even read it again. I was annoyed because I'd sold my first and second copies back to the bookstore and wasn't about to buy it again. The really irritating thing about all this was that none of the professors assigned even remotely similar topics for their papers, so I couldn't even recycle my writing.

In grad school, I took a course called The Comic Novel. It started out well, with Candide (the only other novel I was ever assigned more than once) and Tristram Shandy. Did you know they were both published in the same year, 1759? But when the time for Catch-22 rolled around, I was really starting to identify with Yossarian, and I wondered if my university had raised the number of times the book had to be read to 80.

When my husband and I began our tradition of reading aloud to each other (a habit we formed in our first week together), guess what was the first novel he wanted to read together? It was his belief that I really would love the book, if I could just form a positive association with it instead of having the number of missions papers I had to write about it raised every time I thought I'd written my last paper.

But it was our first week together, and I had little hearts dancing around my head, so I agreed. I was just smitten enough to believe that hearing it read in his voice could change my feelings about it. I did appreciate it a bit more, whether that was because my husband read it to me or because I didn't have to write papers about it or whether I just wasn't annoyed this time. I actually laughed out loud in places. But, you know, it was still a war novel.

And then yesterday I saw the 1970 film for the first time. And, well, it was a war film. But pretty good as war films go. I especially liked the camera angles. Unfortunately for the people involved in making the film, MASH was released the same year. I haven't seen that movie, either. War film. I've seen a couple episodes of the TV series by accident, but not many. War series.

Here's a page of trivia about the Catch-22 film.

There are almost as many different covers of the novel as the number of times I had to read the book for college.

You can read an excerpt here.