So I'm reading Catch-22, because I haven't, and because my husband assures me it is a classic American book that I should read. It's not often Aaron recommends a book that doesn't have "hypothesis" or "transform" in the title, so...

As far as I've been able to tell so far (106 pages in), the plot of the book goes something like this:

There's this guy, right? And war sucks. And everyone's crazy and/or full of shit. And then, right, there's this other guy? And war sucks. And everyone's crazy and/or full of shit. And the first guy, right, he says to the second guy, "You know, war sucks?" And the second guy says, "You're crazy." And the first guy says, "You're full of shit." And then war sucks some more. And they're crazy. And full of shit.

The prose style is like reading a train wreck; the sentences career wildly over the page, dragging you along like the Red Queen pulling Alice across the chessboard of Wonderland, except with fighter planes instead of flamingo croquet games. Something like that, except I can't get even close to the sheer, utter, futile nonsense.

Aaron continues to assure me that this is a brilliant masterpiece of American satire. I'm wondering if it's like Dadaism, and the satire's on me--the poor sod willing to read 400+ pages of this stuff. Will the punchline be, "Ha ha! War's really quite jolly! But you're crazy! And I'm full of shit!"