thank you!

Thanks for your list. Was going to add All Quiet, but for me this is the better book.

it doesn't say "best!"i didn't add All Quiet because i remember loving it but not if it had combat. i read it when i was a kid.

Fair point. And oh yes, it does. Added.

I may have to add, for a non-fiction contribution, Finkel's The Good Soldiers, but I feel I ought to read it first.

thank you. i'm going to read it too. now i'm reading Catch 22, which i had never read, and had no idea was so brilliant.

That's one of those books I read as a teenager but think my older self would appreciate more.

yeah. i have learned, since starting it, that american and english and candadian teens read this book, and frankly i'm a little surprised. it's not entirely easy. the humor and the language are pretty subtle, and the philosophy rather deep.

or maybe used to read?

Good point, I'm not sure. As I remember it, it was pretty ubiquitous during my early adolescence, it may have lost its presence by now.

a remarkably high number of these books are combat and war related. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/issue/b...

Yes. Lots of WW2 in particular for some reason. Despite the WWI centenary next year.

Why are you interested in books on soldiers in combat right now? Also, does post-combat trauma count, because if so When I Forgot is a terrific, horrible portrayal of that and other related subjects.

it's a good question. i don't know. maybe some desire to read about trauma that is easy to understand and doesn't mean any single individual is evil (the evil is all outside, so to speak -- the enemy, leaders of both sides, generals, etc.). maybe it gives me a sense of simplicity, clear lines, and also courage and strength and resilience.

i am intensely interested now in When I Forgot. thanks for mentioning it.

It's very good. Paths of Glory fits your description well-it represents war as an impersonal system with an inevitable logic and (unlike in the also great movie, in which Kirk Douglas' s Colonel Dax offers heroic resistance) there is a dearth of heroes and out-and-out villains--though no lack of victims.

ha. no kirk douglas character in the book! hard to imagine!