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Tough-O-Meter

We've got your back. With the Tough-O-Meter, you'll know whether to bring extra layers or Swiss army knives as you summit the literary mountain. (10 = Toughest)

(7) Snow Line

Reading Catch-22 might give you the impression that Joseph Heller wrote a regular book, cut it into chapters, then threw the whole thing up in the air and glued it back together however he found it. Of course, it's not impossible to pick up the threads through this broken narrative, but it can be darn tricky. Still, if you can embrace the back-and-forth in time, you'll be on to one of the key themes of the book: war is the ultimate collapse of logic. So how could a logical, once-upon-a-time-the-end narrative possibly make any sense? It's like a catch—oh, wait.