It is a rare pleasure to find the private, secret corners of your inner world reflected back to you through another’s words. Simple Passion is the most vulnerable account of romantic passion I have ever encountered; Ernaux recounts even the most humiliating aspects of delirious passion, and in doing so gifts us with moments of mutual recognition and solidarity in the madness.

While Florence Adler is a quiet novel, it lacks the hallmarks of an excellent literary fiction: psychological deep-dives into complex characters, dissecting relationships, everyday emotions explored in a new light. Here, the characters are quite ordinary and the relationships are relatively straightforward. There was nothing to anchor my curiosity, and as a result I floated through this quiet plot rather than actively participating in it.

Satire and absurdism dialed up to a million - Catch-22 exposes the absurdity of war through interweaving vignettes of a bomb squad stationed in Italy.

This book would have been highly impactful had it been about 200 pages shorter. Within the first 50 pages, an astute reader understands what's going on: military leadership making absurd choices to appear successful rather than leading their troops to success, the whole concept of Catch-22, the ridiculous wartime bureaucracy, the irrationality of killing in order to live.

Once you get the formula (absurd military leadership decision -> troops scrambling to make sense of it -> conclusion: the entire war enterprise is absurd) each subsequent vignette feels useless. That's probably the point: driving home that war is useless. But from an emotional and intellectual experience as a reader, my interest waned drastically since there was no new analysis.

The second half of the novel moves from silly absurdism to dark irrationality. This emotional shift would have been much more impactful had I not already been checked out.

While a worthwhile read simply because of its foundational place in modern literature and having birthed the ubiquitous Catch-22 concept, I feel its message was likely far more radical during its publication than it is today. I appreciate it for what it is, a unique take on the anti-war novel, but the overall experience left too much to be desired.