I'd been meaning to get around to Catch-22 ever since my father explained to me the meaning of the title phrase as used in everyday conversation.  That was about 30 years ago.  So I'm a little slow in following through on my personal goals, but I think I deserve points for perseverance!  Besides, a lot of things happened in those 30 years.  

Thirty years is a long time to wait to read an acknowledged masterpiece.  It tends to produce overly large expectations.  Although I encountered several laugh-out-loud, read-them-to-whomever-you're-in-the-room-with passages, there were large stretches where you could see the intended humor, but it seemed dated or too contrived to be worth the effort.  Regarding the latter, most of the material on Milo Minderbinder comes to mind.  

The whole book can be summed up as cynicism taken beyond absurdity, placed in the context of World War II.  That yields a good dose of humor and some interesting logical outworkings (the real "catch" is that a bomber crewman can be taken off of flight duty if he is insane, but a desire to be removed from flight duty is conclusive evidence of sanity, and no one who is willing to fly -- who by definition is insane -- ever requests removal from duty), especially regarding the mindset and bureaucratic reality of an organization as large as the United States military.  But it also yields a dark presentation of the human experience as nothing but a series of one small, meaningless farce after another, adding up to nothing.

John Yossarian, the anti-hero of the novel, reminds me of Harry Flashman of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series (I've reviewed at least one of the Flashman novels in a previous post).  Both men, having ended up in the military, are thoroughgoing cowards when it comes to the battlefield, though recklessly fearless when it comes to the conquest of women.  (Flashman outdoes Yossarian in the latter field, but chasing women seems to have been somewhat less scandalous in Yossarian's world, meaning a full-fledged pursuit of it by Yossarian would make him "fit in" with his contemporaries in a way that only separated Flashman from his Victorian-era compatriots.  And Yossarian was determined not to fit it.  But I think I have figured out why I like Flashman, and don't like Yossarian.  It's because Flashman at least understands that his cowardice and carnalism are weaknesses not to be admired.  He may even classify them as sins, though he sees no hope of reformation or redemption.  But Yossarian views his cowardice as the perfectly rational, even morally obligatory, response of a good man to an absurd universe and all it demands of him.  His fleshly pursuits are just another way to pass the time.  Yossarian is a jerk, if a clever and sometimes sympathetic jerk, especially given the absurd nature of his world.  

I know, I know -- who am I to be so dismissive of such a classic work of 20th century American literature, and to favor Flashman over Yossarian?!?  But that would be to argue from authority, expertise, and agreed-upon standards.  I don't think Yossarian would go for that.

More science fiction!  Arthur C. Clarke was one of the greats of the genre, though this is only the second or third of his works that I've read.  I was always more of an Isaac Asimov fan.  But that's probably just because I discovered Asimov first, and at a time when "Arthur C. Clarke" was so directly identified in popular culture with "2001: A Space Odyssey" and little else.  And 2001, for all its merits, had relatively little appeal to a teen who had been so heavily influenced by Star Wars.

This is a good read.  Knowing the end is coming in a few hundred years through our sun exploding, Earth sends out "seed ships" to colonize other worlds so humanity won't be wiped out.  These ships take hundreds of years to reach their destinations, whereupon robots terraform the new planets and raise the first generation of humans who will occupy them.  The story here is about one final seed ship that carried adult humans away from Earth at the last possible moment before destruction, and what happens when that ship visits a seedship world several generations after its development.  Clarke tells a good story and pulls in various elements of modern thought -- environmentalism, a scientific modernist take on religion as a primitive and (mostly) destructive force but one for which there is some home, the hard science of space travel, contact with alien intelligence, and plenty of others.  

And hey, as the cover says, it's a "New York Times Bestseller", so you can't go wrong!

Every once in a while you come across a book that explains why certain aspects of the world work the way they do, or why certain people behave they way they do, and it enlarges your worldview.  The Big Test did that for me.  It turns out that the reason my parents were so concerned about how well I did on standardized tests, the reason I received academic scholarships to attend college, and the reason I'm in one of the "elite" professions today (as characterized by Mr. Lemann) is that a bunch of upper crust New Englanders thought the world should work this way, and set about making it do so about 75 or 80 years ago.  As a Southerner, I'm continually disturbed to learn how much of my life is shaped by what Yankees thought it should look like, but there it is.  Of course, it didn't work out exactly like Lemann's "Episcopacy" wanted it to -- whereas they sought to pull up promising candidates into the national elite by identifying intrinsic abilities through standardized testing, expecting those candidates to respond with gratitude and devote their lives to public service, it turns out that Americans can see opportunity when it presents itself, and most, having come from non-privileged economic backgrounds, have chosen to take what's been given to them and build good economic lives for themselves and their children.  Along the way, there's probably been not insignificant impact on the US economy and standard of living, but that's beyond the scope of this book's analysis.

Lots to say here.  This is a top ten read on my lifetime list.  I'll have to come back to it later when I have more time.  Suffice to say, if you haven't read this book, you need to.