Recent reading

Willa Cather, My Ántonia
Just an absolutely beautiful book, and beautifully written. It might require a certain midwesternness to appreciate, but the wandering, the gradually unfolding intellectual life, the sweetness of regret and memory, all of it very, very good.
And of course one off-note, very racist chapter with a visiting black piano player. I think it was intended to be beautiful, too, but the question remains--how can the author have been so sensitive to the small but meaningful differences between people, Bohemian and Austrian, city and country, destined to be married and destined to be single--and no curiosity at all about someone because of their skin color? As long as I live I will never understand it.

Joseph Heller, Catch-22
A book I read in maybe 8th grade? I remembered Major Major Major, that I found it humorous, and pretty much nothing else. Its twist is not really much of one, in the end--Yossarian is traumatized when he cannot cleanly hide the reality of war and death and never recovers. There is something about this happening to an American, and in The Good War, too: there's an active and longstanding European literature on the horrors of war, but not much of an American one.
The humor is, as it happens, a bit of a gimmick: not just the perverse incentives of people who fight wars, but the structure of the paragraphs, so many smash cuts between "x will never happen, I swear it!" and "alright, x is going to happen".
I begrudge this book not at all--at the time I first read it the subject matter was beyond me, and now that I know the subject matter better, I am beyond it. But not a bad first place to begin. Especially if the goal is to gradually introduce to the average reader the idea that America might be wrong about some things, and perhaps that there is a level of violence that is never justified.