Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (3.5 stars)

It's clever, very clever. Comedy in the form of a novel is one of the toughest gigs around. Getting someone to laugh with just the written word, without the benefit of the body language and expression that comes with images or a live performance, requires a special talent. Heller has that talent, although I confess the best he got from me was a few 'heh's.

Heller wields absurdity, irony, and hypocrisy as weapons to expose the absurdity, irony, and hypocrisy of war and military bureaucracy. In effect it feels like a really, really long Monty Python skit written down in words. Clevinger's mistake in asking the audience for questions after a briefing would also fit perfectly as a Blackadder scene, with these responses:

"Who is Spain?"
"Why is Hitler?"
"When is righ?"
"Where was that stooped and mealy-colored old man I used to call Poppa when the merry-go-round broke down?"
"How was trump at Munich?"
"Ho-ho beriberi."
and
"Balls!"
all rang out in rapid succession.

Heller brings his acid touch to a wide range of subjects from the meaningless military pennants awarded for meaningless activities:

Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.

to the agricultural subsidies that benefited Major Major Major's family (and yes, he is promoted in the novel to Major, making him Major Major Major Major), which pretty much fits exactly with the republican position on US corn subsidies:

Major Major's father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all.

The plot is complex. It dives down tangent after tangent and continually introduces new characters while jumping all over the place. Despite all that confusion it is in fact highly structured. Early in the novel Heller writes as if the reader is intimately familiar with a series of events which have not yet been described. These story threads are eventually explained and tied back in much later in the novel, finally providing the context for a joke that was already told.

And of course the novel gave birth to a phrase that is now common vernacular. Not many novels can claim such an obvious effect on popular culture:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions.

The characters are excellent, and you come to realise that despite some unusual behaviour (such as perching naked in a tree to watch a funeral), Yossarian is extremely rational and entirely sensible to be trying to avoid getting killed.

A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishman are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for.

Heller's portrayal of Milo's black market empire and the market forces that eventually bring him to bomb his own troops is absurd and masterful.

Towards the end of the novel we are brought roughly into the horror of war as Yossarian has a dream-like walk through a Rome soaked in violence and we finally witness Snowden's death that pushed Yossarian over the edge. This is the section I liked the least. The final chapters lose all comedy and become a series of long discussions, such as the one between Yossarian and Major Danby, that seem very direct and out of character. It's almost like Heller got to the end and decided: quick, drive the point home!

This was my second time through this novel and it isn't an easy read. I'm giving it a fairly low score to match my level of enjoyment, but I think it is definitely worth reading.

3.5 stars.

With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by E.B. Sledge (4.5 stars)

Could there be a better surname for a marine? This book got onto my list because it has one of the highest positive ratings on amazon - almost every one of the 466 people who reviewed it gave it 5 stars. It is a great read.

Sledge is a talented writer, and gives us a very heartfelt insight into what it was like to be a marine in the Pacific theatre in WWII. He doesn't talk himself up unnecessarily, give a dry history lesson, or attempt to give all american soldiers hero halos. He recounts some grisly mutilations performed by both sides on wounded enemy soldiers, this one by an American marine:

He put the point of his kabar on the base of a tooth and hit the handle with the palm of his hand. Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the knife point glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim's mouth. The Marine cursed him and with a slash cut his cheeks open to each ear. He put his foot on the sufferer's lower jaw and tried again. Blood poured out of the soldier's mouth. He made a gurgling noise and thrashed wildly. I shouted, "Put the man out of his misery."

It wasn't simply souvenir hunting or looting the enemy dead; it was more like Indian warriors taking scalps.

The Japanese version of this practice was even more grisly so I won't recount it here, but Sledge says that after he saw it:

From that moment on I never felt the least pity or compassion for them no matter what the circumstances.

Sledge puts you into his miserable, stinking, trench-foot-infected boots. His descriptions of the battlefield and his state of mind are compelling, you can feel his fear as the first beach landing approaches:

I broke out in a cold sweat as the tension mounted with the intensity of the bombardment. My stomach was tied in knots. I had a lump in my throat and swallowed only with great difficulty. My knees nearly buckled, so I clung weakly to the side of the tractor. I felt nauseated and feared that my bladder would surely empty itself and reveal me to be the coward I was.

Sledge is fiercely proud of the Marines (including the Gunnery Sergeant that scrubs his genitals with a shoe brush) and their 'esprit de corps', but also acknowledges the skill of the Japanese on a number of occasions for creating sophisticated mutually supporting defensive positions and their excellent fire discipline. Actually, my only criticism of the whole book is the overuse of the terms 'esprit de corps', 'defense in depth', and 'mutually supporting defensive positions'.

I had marked many quotes about the horrors of war, including a great one about having to dig a defensive position through mud and maggot-ridden corpses, but instead I will leave you with something more thought-provoking but equally depressing.

But something in me died at Peleliu. Perhaps it was a childish innocence that accepted as faith the claim that man is basically good.

4.5 stars

Update:I watched the HBO series The Pacific, which is largely based on this book. At the start of each episode is a 5-10 minute mini documentary that gives the historical context for the episode. The series is fantastic and does a great job of re-creating the horrific events recorded by Sledge.

Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell (4 stars)

Woodrell is a talented writer. He paints for us the bleak world of the rural poor in the Missouri Ozarks. The main character, Ree Dolly, at 16 is left in an incredibly tough situation by the disappearance of her meth-cook father, who vanishes, leaving her with a mentally ill mother and two younger siblings to look after. Ree attempts to navigate a sinister and violent world to find out what happened to her father.

The Dolly clan is characterised by violence, drugs, and hate of outsiders and the police. In many exchanges the violence simmering underneath the words is palpable:

I said shut up once already, with my mouth

Woodrell captures a heartbreaking acceptance of this existence in, at times, brilliant lyrical prose that reminded me of Cormac McCarthy:

Love and hate hold hands always so it made natural sense that they'd get confused by upset married folk in the wee hours once in a while and a nosebleed or bruised breast might result. But it just seemed proof that a great foulness was afoot in the world when a no-strings roll in the hay with a stranger led to chipped teeth or cigarette burns on the wrist.

If there is a weakness in this book, it is the plot. I kept waiting for the impending disaster to happen, and the climax when it finally came, was just not climactic. It seems Woodrell was more interested in writing the rough sketches of a story to hang some brilliant characters on, than producing a gripping plot line. His characters certainly were impressive: the steely determination of Ree (reminiscent of Mattie), and the contradictions in violence and love from Uncle Teardrop were well presented.

I'd read more Woodrell, and now I need to see the movie.

4 stars.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (4 stars)

This story is told in a series of flashbacks or dream sequences by Jacob Jankowski, a 93 year old man living in a nursing home. Usually with this style of narration I find the present-day a boring, cardboard prop for narration of the story, however this book is different. Jacob's character gives us a real insight into the trials of growing old, losing independence, and having any sign of independent thought be interpreted as the complaining of a cantankerous SOB.

But then in your thirties something strange starts to happen. It's a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I'm - you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but your're not. You're thirty-five. And then you're bothered, because you wonder if this is the beginning of the the end. It is, of course, but it's decades before you admit it.

I saw some of Jacob in my own grandmother as she aged: the difficulty she had in recognising her own family members, and the increasing need to supply more of the conversation as her days became less active and provided less fuel for conversation.

My platitudes don't hold their interest and I can hardly blame them for that. My real stories are all out of date. So what if I can speak firsthand about the Spanish flu, the advent of the automobile, world wars, cold wars, guerilla wars, and Sputnik - that's all ancient history now. But what else do I have to offer? Nothing happens to me anymore. That's the reality of getting old, and I guess that's really the crux of the matter. I'm not ready to be old yet.

But old Jacob is really only a small part of the story. Most is taken with his time spent in the circus after a final year exam freakout due to the death of his parents. It is a rocking read, with plenty of colourful desperate characters set against Depression era poverty and exploitation. Larger circuses mop up smaller bankrupt ones in a ruthless manner: cherry-picking the best animals and 'freaks', as Uncle Al calls them, and disposing of unwanted employees by throwing them from the moving circus train during the night.

Some reviewers have complained of lack of character depth, but I don't think this was a huge problem. I thought August's character was interesting with his ability to be completely charming and completely ruthless, and Jacob's noble-sounding love of animals, that he frequently compromised to keep his job and avoid conflict with August, rang true for me.

I'll leave you with another poignant quote:

With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not.

4 stars.

Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov (3.5 stars)

The final book in the original trilogy. I enjoyed this one more than the other books since there were more elements of suspense: who are the Second Foundationers, and where is their home base? My money was on the Second Foundation being distributed across many planets to enable maximum control, but I won't tell you if I was right. I picked some of the surprises, but I think it suffered from trying to be too clever in twist after twist.

There were some great technology predictions in this 1950s novel. I liked this one:

Actually, it was a complicated computer which could throw on a screen a reproduction of the night sky as seen from any given point of the Galaxy.

In today's world we don't really have a need for that since we're not trying to navigate through deep space using star references, but I think asimov would be amazed at seeing google sky on a mobile phone. It's funny that another prediction he makes, the death of the keyboard as an input device in favour of voice recognition:

Nobody but some old drips would use key machines

just hasn't happened to any significant extent. In the same example he has Arcadia dictating a complete document from a printed first draft, which is something that has changed significantly. Being able to jump back and forth in a document and make continual improvements is very different from running through a series of complete drafts, typewriter style.

There are some logic puzzles presented in the text that I loved:

"Have you a defense in case I am [calling you a traitor]?"
"Only the one I presented to the general. If I were a traitor and knew the whereabouts of the Second Foundation, you could Convert me and learn the knowledge directly. If you felt it necessary to trace me, then I hadn't the knowledge beforehand and wasn't a traitor. So I answer your paradox with another."
"Then your conclusion?"
"That I am not a traitor"
"To which I must agree, since your argument is irrefutable."

Hardly best all-time series, but a good read. Not sure if I'll continue with the later sequels and prequels.

3.5 stars

Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov (3 stars)

Opinion seems to be divided on the relative merits of each of the foundation novels, but in my mind, this is definitely a weaker novel. The story is less fractured, but even though we have more time to get to know the characters, they turn out to be far less interesting than those of the first book, such as Salvor Hardin and Hober Mallow. Bayta and Toran just bob along in the tide of history and the only interesting feature is the mysterious Mule. I hope he sticks around in the third book so we can get to know him better.

Honestly this book felt like a filler device: necessary to flesh out the historical details and introduce a great conflict between the Mule and the Second Foundation.

There were however a few pieces of dialogue that stuck with me. I liked the irony in Ebling Mis' swearing using the word unprintable

...taking care of every little piece of their unprintable lives.

and could just picture him busting out a frustrated:

Ga-LAX-y!

I also loved this characterisation of Mayor Indbur, it reminded me of a former manager of mine:

Mayor Indbur, third of his name, and second mayor of Foundation history to be so by right of birth, recovered his equilibrium, and lifted another sheet of paper from the neat stack at his left. It was a report on the saving of funds due to the reduction of the quantity of metal-foam edging on the uniforms of the police force. Mayor Indbur crossed out a superflous comma, corrected a misspelling, made three marginal notations, and placed it upon the neat stack at his right. He lifted another sheet of paper from the neat stack at his left...

3 stars.

Foundation by Isaac Asimov (3.5 stars)

The hugo for "best all-time series"? Seems a little prematurely awarded in 1966, given how young science fiction was, but hey it beat lord of the rings, so I had better read it.

Asimov creates a grand plot arc where 'psychohistorians' can make long and accurate predictions into the future about immensely complex systems - the political and economic interactions of millions of worlds populated by humans scattered throughout the galaxy. I was willing to suspend disbelief on that actually being possible and get into enjoying a plucky group of scientists defending the intelligence of the galaxy through an age of barbarism, but I found the writing style took some of the shine off what could have otherwise been brilliant.

The story is broken into a series of short stories along lines such as "The Encyclopedists", "The Mayors", "The Traders" etc. which has the effect of removing any meaningful character development and introducing fairly jarring shifts between time and groups. I think if I had known beforehand that it was originally published as a series of short story serials I would have been more forgiving.

The central problem seems to be trying to cover many centuries of time and events without digging into the real details. I think if you described the set-up, a futuristic fall of rome, and some of the ideas presented in this book such as: presenting technology as a religion to enable central control, and conquest through trade in trinkets, to another author, it could be re-written into a fantastic book.

As it stands I enjoyed the book, but I doubt the series will get my 'best of all time' award.

3.5 stars.