Jeremy Lukens

An expertly crafted novella where James makes you put in a good deal of work to figure out what exactly is going on, but is highly rewarding. It is the story's ambiguity – most the the scenes can be interpreted in more than one way – that makes it so powerful. Read it slowly and take the time to let your imagination run wild.

The day before I started reading this, a video went viral showing a sinkhole open up in a hotel pool in Israel. One person was sucked inside and died while others barely escaped. If you looked at the tweets about the video, most of them celebrated that a Jewish person had been killed or were disappointed that only one person died. It was a good reminder that, though it's not as obvious right now, hating Jewish people and wanting them dead never really went out of style.

And that's why Elie Wiesel's memoir is so important. The book chronicles his experience as a teenager during the Holocaust, where he and all the Jews in Transylvania were sent to ghettos, then shipped in cattle cars to concentration camps. Most of the book details he and his father's attempts to stay alive, trying to avoid “selection” that would send them to the crematorium.

The book details unimaginable horrors, but perhaps the scariest thing of all is that as time goes by, Wiesel gets desensitized to it. After seeing so much horror and misery, he becomes numb, as does the reader of his story.

It's easy to become numb to the brokenness, hatred, and evil in our world. When the concentration camps were liberated, people started using the slogan “never again” as a rallying cry and an admonition to the rest of the world. But such a promise means remembering and recognizing the horrors of the Holocaust. “Night” is one important document to help with that task.

If you're into satire, quirky characters, and government bureaucracy, this is your jam!

Yossarian is a neurotic bombardier who doesn't want to fly any more missions because he's scared of dying. He makes frequent visits to the hospital, where he fakes a liver issue so he can lie in bed all day. Then he decides to try to convince his superiors that he's crazy (and he might really be), because anyone who is crazy isn't allowed to fly. All they have to do is request to be grounded due to their mental health. But the catch is that anyone who does submit such a request is deemed to be sane because only a sane person would care about their safety. Heller's book is full of those types of catches, paradoxes, and circular reasoning.

This is the funniest novel I've ever read. Every page has laugh-out-loud moments and witticisms. Satire is very difficult to do well and Heller masters it here.

The story is told in a nonlinear fashion, with scenes connected by free association and the pieces slowly coming together to form a narrative. But even so, it's more a collection of crazy occurrences than a strong plot and no character really has any arc. Instead, the many characters exist for comic relief, to further the story, and to make satirical points. Every character is crazy in one way or another, which is why there's another catch to trying to get out of missions: Crazy people must be able to go on missions, because no one else will.

With stronger character arcs, this might be a perfect novel, but even without it, it's a timeless classic and one of the great American novels.

If you're into poetic prose, colonialism, and gossip, this is your jam!

Not much happens. It's mostly people talking about how amazing Kurtz is and people talking about people talking about how amazing Kurtz is. But we're never really shown him being amazing. That's part of the point, I think, but everything seems hollow.

Conrad's prose is elegant and evocative, but there's not much plot or even character development to latch onto. Ultimately, I don't get it. Surely I'm missing something but I think the story is bland and mediocre.