Catch-22
Heller's circular, recursive logic captures exactly how institutions sustain themselves: by making sanity look like madness. The funniest serious novel in American literature, and the definitive anti-war novel. "Catch-22" entered the language as a concept. That is how you know a novel worked.
The first hundred pages fire characters at you out of sequence, and "every chapter is a bombardment of meaningless characters" is the standard report from readers who quit there; one clocks "2 weeks to get 60 pages in." The comedy runs a single joke, military bureaucracy is stupid and evil, until repetition does what repetition does, which is why readers call the book "twice the length it needed to be." The prose gets in its own way, "sooooo overwritten, so over polished," and the structure keeps spawning "too many mini-stories that don't relate to each other." Women exist as bodies attached to men. Goodreads threads list it among the site's most abandoned classics.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
