Catch-22
1961 · 524 pages
Trying to get grounded for insanity, a bombardier learns that asking to be grounded proves he is sane. Heller runs that loop through a whole war until the deaths stop being funny.
★ 8.7
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Slaughterhouse Five
1969 · 215 pages
Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time, between a Dresden meat locker during the firebombing and a zoo on another planet. Vonnegut was in that cellar, and writes "So it goes" after every death.
★ 8.4
The Tin Drum
1959 · 592 pages
Oskar decides on his third birthday to stop growing, keeps his tin drum, and screams glass to pieces while the Nazis take Danzig. Grass forced postwar Germany to look at itself through him.
★ 8.3
Mother Courage and Her Children
1939 · 126 pages
The greatest of the epic-theater plays follows Anna Fierling, a canteen woman hauling her wagon through the Thirty Years' War, selling to whichever army is winning and losing all three children to it.
★ 6.9
The Good Soldier Svejk
1923 · 784 pages
Josef Svejk, a Prague dealer in stolen dogs officially certified an idiot, is swept into the Austro-Hungarian army and obeys every order so eagerly that the whole war machine looks ridiculous.
★ 6.6