Well of course Catch-22 is one of the best books of the 20th Century. It's funny, it's painful and it's insightful about the illogical way that the world is, particularly in wartime.
This got me thinking about the books that hold up for me and conversely those that don't. Do the books that I found meaningful when I was 17 years old still hold up? How, for example, does Catcher in the Rye read to people in their thirties? What books do you read and re-read and which ones do you outgrow?
As a word of explanation, I saw this morning that I could download for free the 1st chapter of Catch-22 on I-Tunes this morning. Give it a listen, it's still brilliant.
I find that Gabriel Garcia Marguez's books hold up very well - they are time-irrelevant.
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