The Book That Coined a Conundrum

Catch-22 is 50 years old. I first read the novel when it was 17, and I haven't read a book I liked better since. If I'd known that would be the case then I might have been depressed, but the reality is that books that help to form our consciousnesses will mostly be read when are young, so it's natural rather than sad to be more attached to the adult books we read early in our teens than those we read later, regardless of merit.

Along the same lines, a critic once said of Heller, Catch-22, and his subsequent novels that any author who creates a idiom will never write a work of equal or greater importance. That always stuck to me as an odd sort of curse, since most writers, having coined the paradox of a generation, would be happy to call it a day.