If there's anyone out there, (as it appears from previous posts there is), who had trouble getting into Catch 22, scroll through to about mid book to the chapter titled 'Nurse Duckett' and start reading from there. I guarantee it'll have you back to the start of the book to ensure you haven't missed something similar earlier in the book.
For those not familiar with the scene, Yossarian is in hospital, (pulling yet another dodgy subterfuge to get out of flying on ops), when Nurse Duckett in her toght while uniform dress leans over to attend to the patient in the bed beside Yossarian's.
Yossarain makes an abrupt and rather forceful upward movement of his fingers-extended hand. With the exception of the memorable phrase 'balancing on her divine fulcrum' I'll leave the rest of Nurse Duckett's reaction to Yossarian's assault to the imagination of the reader. However, it is quite possibly one of the funniest, laugh aloud word pictures I have ever read.
The book contains so many mind-twisting segments. For example:
- Heller's description of how Milo Mindebinder could buy eggs and 10 cents a dozen and sell tham at 5 cents a dozen and make a profit - and sort of make that understandable and believable to the reader.
- Milo's privatising of the war, to the point where Yossarian's USAAF B25 squadron gets airborne and bombs its own base because it's cheaper for the Germans to sub-contract the Americans to do it than to do it themselves. (Shades of Iraq 2003 and onwards!)
- Yossarian getting arrested for being AWL, 'a very serious offence', immediately after Natley throws his girlfriend to her death from his hotel room window - which the MP's totally ignore.
- and of course, 'Catch 22' itself, where the flight surgeon, (just after removing another flyer from ops because he's clearly demonstrated he's not mentally fit to fly on ops because he wants to), tells Yossarian he can't take him off ops because Yossarian has proven himslelf to be sane by not wanting to fly operational missions.
A great read.
Another good 'war-ie' which hasn't been mentioned yet is Tolstoy's 'War and Peace'. A door stopper that needs a lectern to be read comfortably, it none the less explores the war of 1812 and the wildly differing effects war has on different characters in some depth. I liked Prince Andre, who executed every Frenchman he came across, his intention being to make war so terrible the invader would think twice before doing anything like it again. How very different to the attitude of the majority on our side today, (but not perhaps, of Terry Taliban).