As an avid reader, I naturally attempt to make my way through the classics.  Whether I'm flying through the slightly guilty pleasurable works of Jane Austin or slaving over the heavy word choices in Moby Dick, each book offered me thought-provoking insight that stuck with me long after reading the final page.  However, for some reason, no other book seemed to have impacted me the way Catch-22 has.

Almost a year ago, I decided to pick up Joseph Heller's humorous account of war, the origin of the infamous phrase "Catch-22." Recently, I find my mind wandering back to the book to the point that I not only read the Wikipedia page on the book itself, but I perused the character pages as well.  When reading the book for the first time, it may seem like a large jigsaw puzzle with hazy time periods and nonlinear storytelling.  Each sentence is a circular "Catch-22," providing both humor and irony.  The theory of "Catch-22" is a confusing concept that I had trouble wrapping my mind around, though I wanted desperately to understand the intricacies of the rule in each specific case it was used.