I'm looking forward to this one as well...

I just ordered a distant copy to the public library. Should be here in one week and I'll get started.

Am I the only one that's actually purchasing all these books?

I'm going to check and see if this is available at BMV or Chapters because if not, I'll have to wait till I'm settled in Bangkok and see if I can find it there. I'll keep you posted. I don't want to tarnish my flawless bookclub record. And Juraj, I've bought five of the books so far (I already had a few of the others and a couple I got from the library).

I like to buy some in print, some for kindle, and recently i've gotten more into the library books.

Just got mine today and will start it soon. So far, I read only the first sentence, and it flooded me with nastalgic sentiments as I vaguely recalled reading Catch-22 some 10 years ago. It made me remember why I like Catch-22 enough to perhaps put it as my "top pick" in fiction:

Gold has been asked many times to write abot the Jewish experience in America. This is not strictly true. He'd been asked only twice, most recently by a woman in Washington, Delaware....

I made a trip to BMV before leaving and got a hardcover copy for $5.99. After a 15 hour flight to Hong Kong without the TV's working, I had plenty of time to put a good dent in it (I read the first 200 pages or so). I'm loving it so far.

Good luck in Thailand buddy. I'll try to visit you there.

May I ask who you flew with? I had the same problem with Air Canada once and they refused to do a total system reboot because it "wouldn't be fair to the other passengers that already started watching something" (about 15 minutes into the flight). Unlike Swiss, Thai, and New Zealand airways where I had the same problem, and which they all solved by rebooting the entire system so that EVERYONE could watch, Air Canada absolutely refused to do that for the 50%-plus passengers without service... I wasn't a big fan and I think I made several of the unionized 50-something flight attendants quite a bit pissed off at me for complaining several times, and subsequently ordering numerous alcoholic beverages just to spite them.

At least you got a good jump start on everyone else in the book though... Hope to get some updates via fb or email on how life is over there.

- j

My book finally arrived at the library. I've read the first 60 pages and it is very entertaining. Good pick Maur.

By the way, not to harass, but you should all sign up to www.goodreads.com It's an online bookshelf where you can share recommendations and keep track of books you have read, are reading, and want to read. There used to be an application on facebook called visual bookshelf and it is now dead. All hail www.goodreads.com!!

I flew with Air Canada. They did a system re-boot 3 times because no one's TV was working. They gave everyone "compensation" cards, which we found out gives us 5% off any flight with Air Canada in the next year. Whoop-dee-do. But I guess on a $1500 flight that's like $75 off.

Life is good so far. Bangkok is insane. We have an unreal place (check out the link: http://baanmontida.com/). It just opened this year. It's a Spanish style, 5-star place with an unreal pool, gym, steam room, etc. And it's half the price of our place in Canada. It feels like we're on vacation every day.

Food is ridiculously cheap and we drank $1 pints of Heinken on Saturday night. We can't get all the foods we want (cheese, olive oil and nice bread is expensive (by Thai standards - $10 for a bottle of EVOO)). We got a one hour massage for $3 the other day. In Canada, that cost us almost $100 (and Thai massages beat the hell out of you). All are most welcome to visit.

I eff'n miss Thailand - So eff'n cheap there... Your place looks pimpin'. Did you go to a ping pong show yet???

I talked to a few of the airline attendants about the whole system thing, and they told me that to make it properly work, you have to do a whole system shut-down sometimes, instead of just a reboot. They also told me the that most airlines just try to do the reboot (or at least the first time), because it is much faster and takes much less effort re-loading it (plus you need to know HOW to do it). I am not sure if that's the problem with Air Canada, but I find it really hard to believe that all the other airlines can somehow make it work using the same planes and often older ones than Air Can, and yet I frequently have problems on Air Can... Anyway... just drives me a bit crazy but what can you do... Who knows what the real issues are. It's probably all Obama's fault somehow anyway.

- j

I'm sorry is this the travel section of CJM? Just kidding. But seriously, I finished the book yesterday. Awesome and hilarious. It reminded me a lot of Seinfeld, with all of the unfortunate coincidences and characters with no redeeming qualities. On that note, I wondered whether Sid was actually a good guy or not.

Anyway I thought it was a great book and I would love to read more Heller.

I will post more when the rest of you finish.

So you read the entire book in less than a week? 'spect man...

Well, here is the newbie trying his luck....

Obviously, this being from Heller you always have Catch-22 in the back of your mind. Having read only those two from Heller, they strike me as very similar in style. Themes are also recurrent:

• The pessimism of the main characters, Yossarian and Gold. Gold is for example in awe of almost everybody's stupidity and lack of culture. Yossarian cannot believe the cruelty mankind during a visit to Rome, Gold sees decay when coming back to the neighborhood of his childhood (Coney Island)
• There is a strong criticism of the moral bankruptcy of the society in general, as Ralph says everyone works in government for either interest or ambitions. I think this is central in Heller: there is no place for altruism, actions seem to be based on greed, ambition, the world is a cold place indeed.
• Bad deeds are rewarded or go unpunished: Ralph stealing Gold's work, Milo bombing the squadron, etc.
• Heller does not have a lot of respect for authority: the characters in authority are usually even craziest than the rest (Ralph, Pugh, Julius Gold, the Generals and Cathcart).

The reading was difficult at times, as a non-native speaker I feel sometimes Heller's irony evades me.

The family gatherings are great; parallels with today are striking; Gold being the proud intellectual where you could compare Sid (and the rest of the bunch) a little bit to the Tea Party / Fox News, uttering stupidities but winning the argument just by being the majority (at the gathering anyway) and controlling the medium... This kind of universal relativism, where even scientific facts are under attack as being no more than an opinion (evolution, global warming) that is open to 'honest debate' is very real today.

Anyway, glad to join, hopefully I will last longer than Patric. Is Quebec more resilient than Alberta?

ya my plane to Newfoundland got delayed in Halifax for 4 hours, luckily I had my book on me.

that's better than I could have done. While I haven't read Catch-22, I think you are spot on about Good As Gold. I also really enjoyed the family dinner scenes, particularly the back and forth with Sid and Julius Gold. By the end of it though, like I said, I wondered whether Sid was just a happy go lucky guy and it was simply Bruce Gold's paranoia that made him think Sid was after him.

I also found the use of Yiddish particularly in one of the chapters very confusing.

Ralph's contradictory speech was hilarious. One of the central frustrations of Gold's seemed to be people less 'talented' than him getting further ahead. Ralph was a case in point.

Finished the book, and after reading Phil's comments, I realized i probably had very little to add. The assessment was spot on. At the beginning, I tried to concentrate on not drawing comparisons with "Catch-22", but I soon realized it was not really possible to do so. Even though it's been almost 10 years since I read Catch-22 and I thought I had forgotten the book, reading "Good as Gold" made me remember it once again.

I fully agree with Phil that there are a lot of comparisons. In particular, every time Ralph said something, I couldn't help but think that it was very typical of some of the conversations and circular- or paradoxical-reasoning found in so many places throughout the Catch-22 book.

I'm not sure about Sid. I think the one conversation with Joannie kind of explained it no? I.e. that Sid was deliberately trying to get a rise out of him. As sad as it is to say, I found a lot of the dinner scenes similar to my family's dinner scenes, and I could identify with Bruce in the sense that it sometimes drove me crazy when some of my family's friends or my dad would, what seemed like, deliberately contradict other people even though they had actually no idea of what the truth was. While my family's episodes were not exactly as dramatic or extreme as those in "Good as Gold", I couldn't help but laugh a few times because I could really imagine those scenes.

I particularly felt that Bruce was a bit melodramatic and that he simply overreacted at most times. It seems as though he had to simply learn a lesson of humility and patience, and he would have had a much easier life, instead of trying to "beat down a brick wall with his head".

I was once again impressed with Heller's use of language. I absolutely love his little whimsical quotes and feel as though the whole book was full of them. I know that he coined the term "catch-22" when writing the book, and I really wondered if it was also the case with "boggles my mind" in this book. Does anyone know?

Overall, liked that book quite a lot, but I think i still prefer Catch-22...

I agree with you jason. Those were also 2 parts in the book that I really enjoyed, mostly for their novelty. I was also confused when I flipped the page to the paragraph (I believe it was the first paragraph in a new chapter) only to start reading what appeared to be the author's thoughts. It was so random and so unexpected that it also made me feel like Heller is really the only author I can think of, that could end up doing something like that.

I believe that I had to read the paragraph 2 or 3 times just to realize what was happening in the book at that point, and I believe that I even flipped back a page to see if I per chance missed a page or if perhaps the copy of the book that I purchased was a misprint. It really wasn't until that exact scene in the book that I recalled that one weird paragraph, and I thought it was so brilliant. Just as with his characters speaking this contradictory or paradoxical speak, Heller himself did something similar and gave away the ending, which made me think that that was not going to be the ending since he gave it away, only to ultimately discover that it actually was the ending (... or 'climax').

I, however, still feel as though the contradictory things Ralph said in the book, were my favourite part. I think that's why I really liked the Catch-22 book as well. "You can have any position you want. Unless you can't. In which case, perhaps you can't have any..." etc.

The other thing I could just picture is the whole scene with the doctor. "Are you sleeping with my wife." For some reason, in my head I just pictured a Ricky-Gervais-like character acting that part in a very awkward and unfunny (and therefore kind of funny) humour.

I wasn't really able to find whether he coned the term "boggles the mind", but would really like to know. I should get Bill Bryson on the case...

I should be done this week. Hopefully I'll post my comments by the weekend.

First, I thought, ok, these characters are interesting enough. Half way through, I thought, this Gold is an idiot. Three thirds of the way, I thought, Gold is a freaking loser. I'm glad that at the end he turned around and he was only having a mid-life crisis.

I did enjoy the complexities of each of the characters, but frankly some were a bit obnoxious, and others were just unbearable which made me think of Curb your enthusiasm, a bit like Len thought of Seinfield.

Lines I liked: "Do you screw around...I do worse. I eat pork." are priceless. Another bit I liked was when Gold challenges his father about his faith and Julius replies something in the lines of "not religious, but a Jew ... a Jewish atheist."

I do agree with Phil, some parts went way over my head, a lot of it probably due to the language thing. As, like Phil, English is not my mother tongue and I didn't grow up with all the English innuendos.

I also liked how Gold's daughter seemed to be able to predict everything that he wanted to do, including leave his wife. Overall I really enjoyed this book, one of the funniest I've ever read, and the style of humour is right up my alley. I will definitely be reading more Heller after this.

This is a long time coming. I’ve already read two books since Good as Gold, so my memory won’t be as fresh and you guys commented long ago and probably won't even read this. But I digress…here are my thoughts.

I haven’t read Catch 22, so I couldn’t relate to any of your analysis on that, but next to Bill Simmons’ Book of Basketball, Good as Gold might be the funniest book I’ve ever read. I laughed out loud numerous times. I think you guys covered a lot of the funnier parts. I have to re-mention the “boggles the brain” part again. This sentence made me laugh out loud: “Oh Bruce, what a mind you have, what a mind-boggling mind! You know all you need to know, don’t you? It just boggles my mind how you keep boggling my mind. Incidentally, Bruce, what does boggle mean?”

Ralph’s contradictions have already been mentioned, but this one made me laugh out loud too: “Anything you want, as long as it’s everything we tell you to say and do in support of our policies, whether you agree with them or not.”

I found Gold’s relationship with Sid so sad. He would be so angry at him at the family functions and then when he ate lunch with him or met up alone with him, it seemed like Gold wasn’t being fair or was overly mean to him. It actually made me sad when Gold finishes eating lunch with him and then thinks to himself that it would be the last time he would eat lunch with him again. I guess that foreshadowed Sid’s death, although I can’t remember at what point that lunch was.

One theme I will touch on is the Jewish identity (mostly because my wife is “Jew-ish” and I’ve been exposed to a lot of the cultural stuff. I have various examples. When Conover says: “I had a run-in some time ago with that other member of your faith.”
To which Gold replies: “I have no faith.” I found this interesting because Keren was raised Jewish but doesn’t identify at all with the religious side. She identifies with the cultural side and it seems difficult to reconcile the two. It’s like being a Jewish atheist, which is oxymoronic, but possible if you recognize that there is so much more to Judaism than just the religion.
Another example – when Gold says to Conover: you keep speaking of Jews as though that’s all we have to think about. Is that the only thing you have on your mind?” It’s funny because Jews tend to be very “clannish,” and often it is assumed that that’s always what is on their mind (rightly or wrongly). At one point, Ralph thinks Gold’s defending Kissinger and says to him: “People here might get the idea you’re clannish if you keep on defending him so loyally.” Even though Gold wasn’t defending him, and tweaks on Ralph for saying that, it’s funny because in a real life situation, if neither were Jewish, no one would think he was being clannish (maybe if they were Italian – or maybe it’s for any minority). I guess minorities in general tend to be clannish, so maybe this book doesn’t only speak about the Jewish identity, but the identity of minorities.

Conover’s diatribes on Jews are hilarious – “The fact is that I want nothing to do with any Jews but my doctor, lawyer, dentist, accountant, bookkeeper, secretary, broker, butcher, travel agent, tailor, business partner, realtor, banker, financial manager, best friend, and spiritual advisor.” I also love when Conover blatantly calls Gold different names. In one chapter, he calls him: Mr. Goldberg, Mr. Goldfarb, Mr. Goldstaub, Mr. Goldsmith, Goldstein, Goldfine, Mr. Finestein, Mr. Goldfinger, Mr. Goldfedder, and Goldenrod.

To end, I’m looking forward to reading Catch 22, and Heller/Gold has provided me with a new standard by which I can measure friendships. “If Hitler returns, would you hide me?” Gold asks Ralph. Ralph’s response is priceless: “Oh gosh, Bruce, we’re not friends. I thought you knew that.”

I have to say I agree that this is one of the funniest books I've ever read. I may actually have to buy it. And I keep bugging the Jewish people at my office that they must read it.