Any Joseph Heller readers around?

[Wolfman 11]

I picked up "Catch as Catch Can" last week and I just read the story about Bush I. I thought it was great. I knew that he'd pretty much mocked Quayle before in "Closing Time", but I never knew that he badmouthed Bush like that in 1990 while he was still in office. "Yossarian Survives" was great too.

[Syrinx]

1. Is that the guy that wrote "Catch 22?"

I'm having a "senior moment..." and I'm only in my thirties. :D

[Wolfman 11]

4. yes.

pretty good book.

[NightTrain]

2. "Catch-22" is one of my all-time favorite novels.

Shame the film couldn't have been better....

[Reverend_Smitty]

3. I read Catch-22

durring the summer between my Soph and Junior years in high school, the book blew my mind!

[Syrinx]

8. yeah the movie was really confusing

If I recall correctly. I saw it a long, long time ago.

[Catch22Dem]

5. Hmmmmm...Heller....never heard of him

:evilgrin: Obviously I jest.

[Wolfman 11]

6. dude!

I thought of you immediately after I posted this. Have you checked out "Catch as Catch Can" yet?

[Catch22Dem]

7. No, but I will now fer sure!

Thanks for the tip.

[Wolfman 11]

10. there's a bunch of excerpts that didn't make the cut for the novel...

...like a chapter with letters from Nately's dad, plus a chapter on Yossarian's basic training experience and his calisthenics instructor who had a great line, something like: "don't just lie there and wait for the ambulance. Do push-ups!" The short stories are good too, but I recommend skipping to the Catch-22 stuff first.

[Philostopher]

9. I haven't read all of them.

Read 'Catch-22' and 'Closing Time,' and also 'Picture This.' I've meant to read more, but just haven't been reading much fiction the past year or so. Not sure why, since I've always loved to read, but there you go.

I'll have to have a look for 'Catch As Catch Can' -- 'Picture This' really took it out of me, I read it last summer. It may have been the one that put me off fiction for a while. It took me three tries to get into it, but I was glad I finally did -- it wound up being fairly tough on warhawks and moneychangers. Heller didn't think much more highly of liberals in any given age, but it seemed to me he had his sights set on Reagan in that one, even though the book was, on its surface, a parallel telling of the lives of Aristotle and Rembrandt van Rijn.

[Wolfman 11]

11. I've tried to read all his books

Because I liked "Catch-22" and "Good as Gold" so much. I really got hung up on "Something Happened," I guess because it's about mid-life crises and I'm only in my mid-20's. I liked "Picture This" a lot because it seemed to mock the imperialist attitude of the cold war. The only other one I couldn't finish was "God Knows." I just could not get into it. "Portrait of the Artist" was a great final book. So I picked up "Catch as Catch Can" when I saw it in paperback the other day, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a story making fun of George Bush, Sr. that he wrote in 1990 and had published in a magazine. Such is my history of being a Heller fan, beginning when I decided to pick up a tattered copy of Catch-22 at Half-Price books less than two years ago.
The end.